Businesses and Enterprises today are witnessing a revolution of sorts with women converting “problems” into success stories. Fuelled by an indomitable entrepreneurial spirit, these women have become economic engines, playing a decisive role in enriching and promoting business across multiple platforms, observes Manu Shrivastava.
How many of us would see the potential for a multi-million enterprise in a nondescript-seeming ‘domestic’ problem and turn it into one of India’s first fin-tech start-ups? Rati Shetty – Founder and Chief Product Officer (CPO) of BankBazaar.com – did just that and more. Her success story continues to inspire millions, particularly women, in the world of business and technology.
Born in Chennai to a family of entrepreneurs, Rati’s professional journey is nothing short of a B-School case study. After marriage, she and her husband were exploring options to buy a home in India but the search process for a loan turned out to be ‘frustrating and stressful’. They soon realised the need for a hassle-free, online experience in India.
She says, “India was not that digital then and banks not that liberal either. Unlike today, one couldn’t walk into a bank and meet someone unless referred to by a member of the bank. We knew the whole thing could be much simpler and without ‘actually meeting’ a person.” This gave birth to Bankbazaar.com, founded in 2008 on the premise that “people wanted things to be much simpler and transparent.”
Helping address financial needs
Headquartered in Chennai, Bankbazaar.com is the world’s first neutral online marketplace for instant customised rate quotes on loans and credit cards. It is Rati’s “schedule-oriented approach” that helps her balance her personal and professional commitments. “I have a list of things to do every day before I leave for work and it always includes a slot for my fitness regime, either yoga or the gym.”
She advises women to make their own list and stick to it and hopes to see a day when women with views are respected just as men with views.
MobiKwik co-founder Upasana Taku is playing a pivotal role in the country’s digital future. MobiKwik provides a mobile phone-based payment system and digital wallet where customers add money to an online wallet that can be used for payments. Upasana’s current responsibility is to ‘simplify payment acceptance for retailers in India’ and lead MobiKwik’s evolution into a financial distribution hub that caters to their financial needs. She is focussing on bringing a million retailers on the platform to provide them access to a host of financial services on the MobiKwik platform.
Women furthering women causes
Social entrepreneur, author Aditi Gupta is the co-founder of the comic Menstrupedia. Being a woman Aditi had first-hand experienced and witnessed the myths and taboo surrounding menstruation and wanted to change that. In 2012, she founded the comic with her husband. Menstrupedia has been benefitting thousands of young girls across India. In 2014, Aditi was listed on the Forbes India 30 under 30 list for her work.
One of the most popular platforms for women, Sheroes.in is a community platform, an ecosystem for women, ‘offering support, resources, opportunities and interactions via Sheroes.com and the SHEROES App’. Through her several enterprises and initiatives, Sairee is building up women at work and future-of-work conversations in India, changing the gender narrative and building a strong technology play to solve the problems of gender disparity in India.
SafeCity Founder and CEO Elsa Marie D’Silva was in the aviation industry for 20 years when she decided to make a career switch. She wanted to focus on empowering women and the youth by using technology to create awareness, education and interaction. SafeCity is a platform that crowdsources personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. This data which maybe anonymous, gets aggregated as hot spots on a map indicating trends at a local level. The idea is to make this data useful for individuals, local communities and local administration to identify factors that cause behaviour that leads to violence and work on strategies for solutions.
Revathi Kulkarni Roy is a serial entrepreneur who pioneered the first ever women’s taxi service in Asia creating brands like FORSCHE – Asia’s first all-women taxi serviceand VIIRA – a taxi service in Mumbai by women for women. Her latest venture Hey Deedee is the first ever all women instant parcel delivery service. She has been working to empower urban poor women through her various initiatives. She has also won the NITI AAYOG’s Women Transforming India Awards2016.
Supporting other start-ups
Founder and Managing Director of Kalaari Capital, Vani Kola spent 22 years in Silicon Valley and founded two companies, Rightwrok and Certus software. She moved back to India and started her career as a Venture capitalist after partnering with New Enterprise Associates (NEA). After starting operations in 2012 with a 150-million-dollar fund, Vani has come a long way by investing in and supporting e-commerce sector ventures.
Listed as one of the most powerful women in Indian Business by Fortune India, Vani has also won the NDTV Women of Worth award for entrepreneurship and TiE Delhi-NCR 5th Edition of women Entrepreneurship Summit Award. She had made early investments in Flipkart and Myntra.
Ankita Vashishta is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of ‘India’s (and Asia’s) first venture capital fund that invests in and promotes women entrepreneurship’. Through SAHA Fund Ankita has also invested in technology and innovation sectors in India, Asia, UK and the US.
Ankita had worked in the investment space in India, Singapore, the Philippines, UK and US for more than eight years before launching SAHA Fund. She says she founded SAHA Fund to ‘promote and scale up successful businesses that have women leaders, or women employees or women consumers as the focus – across healthcare, brands, Artificial Intelligence (AI), financial services, analytics and cybersecurity’.
Ensuring smart and safe travelling experience
Through ExpressEarth Digital Services, founder Basudha Shrivastav has created a niche environment for smart travellers providing different options for travelling that truly suit you and not a travel company or agent. Founded in 2015 with Basudha’s husband Himanshu Narula, ExpressEarthtakes care of all travel needs including hotels, transport, insurance, etc. They have won several awards including the NASSCOM 10k programme.
Chitra Gurnani Daga co-founded Thrillophilia with husband Abhishek Daga that is now one of the most well-known travel companies in India. An alumnus of the Indian School of Business (ISB), Chitra was passionate about business and travelling and decided to pursue her dream to realise her passion. Thrillophilia curates local experiences for unique and offbeat travel stories. With 3.5 million monthly users, it is one of the largest online platforms for travel experiences.
Furthering access to education
Divya Gokulnath co-founded educational platform BYJU’s to help students learn better. After completing engineering degree programme and joined BYJU Raveendran’s classes as his student. Eventually, she got married to him and they launched BYJU’s together.
Today, BYJU’s is the world’s most valuable ed-tech start-up. It offers learning through an app and website for students of classes 1st till 12th and for competitive exams like JEE, CAT, NEET and IAS.
Through their start-up Cogitus, Ruchi Jhawar and Anju Modi are offering creative education to children and that too beyond the four walls of a classroom. After starting in Ranchi in 2017, the duo has taken their start-up to other Indian cities like Bengaluru, Pune, Indore, Satna and Surat. They wanted to take education from traditional learning to higher thinking and Cogitus, meaning ‘I think’ in Latin, promotes that for children in the age group of 4 – 14 years.
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Manu Shrivastava
Manu Shrivastava is a media legal researcher with DraftCraft International, and co-convener of ‘The Woman Survivor’ initiative that documents abuse of women and children within families.
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