Several New Yorkers of South Asian origin have made it to the Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ list of “young game changers, movers and makers.” The fourth annual compilation includes 30 achievers in each category including retail, sports, medicine, technology and food industry, under the age of 30 from across the globe and from all fields of study.
Named in Law and Policy category is New York City-based Nikhil Nirmel, 28, founder of Lawdingo, a tech startup streamlining the process and cost of hiring an attorney. Others in the category, recognized for “projecting their worldview in the capital and on the internet,” are Ohio state representative Niraj Antani 23; Daniel Rajaiah, 23, director of external affairs at the Office of the Mayor, Cincinnati, Ohio; Vikrum Aiyer, 29, deputy chief of Staff for the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property; Joy Basu, 28, JD-MBA candidate at Stanford University; and Rahul Rekhi, 23, advisor to the chief medical officer, U.K. Department of Health.
Umang Dua, 28, of New York, co-founder of Handy, a startup that promises to whisk a professional cleaner to your house at the touch of an app, features in the Consumer Tech category for “turning your smartphone into life’s remote control.”
Others who made it to the list are Ankur Jain, 24, of Bellevue, Washington, and his partner David Wyler, 29, co-founders of Humin, which combines ones contacts, social networks and calendars into a neat, searchable interface; Rujul Zaparde, 20 of San Francisco and his partner Kevin Petrovic, 20,co-founders of FlightCar, which lets you hire out a car from the airport while gone on a trip; and Jason Shah, 25, also of San Francisco, founder of Do.com, which aims to fix unproductive meetings, by helping users be better prepared and keep better track of what happens in meetings.
The Retail and E-Commerce list includes New York City-based Deepa Gandhi, 29, co-founder of Dagne Dover, which raised $1.25 million in September to fund production of its ultra-functional purses and Neil Parikh, 25, co-founder of Casper, a mattress company with about $15 million in venture funding that is trying to change the way people buy mattresses; as well as 26-year-olds Aman Advani and Gihan Amarasiriwardena, co-founders of the Boston-based Ministry of Supply, a men’s fashion company which has developed dress shirts that use NASA-developed technology to manage heat and moisture.
Named in the Finance category for “influencing money flows in the global economy” are three from New York City, including Aarti Kapoor, 29, vice president at Moelis & Co.; Brij Khurana, 29, vice president at PIMCO; Vikram Modi, 26, senior vice president at Two Sigma Investments; and Sudar Purushothaman, 28, director at Fundamental Credit Opportunities in New York City and Colorado; and Ali Khan, 29, portfolio manager at Fidelity Investments in Boston.
Those who are “setting the standard for new strategies and tools for brand engagement” in marketing and advertising include Azita Ardakani, 29, of New York, founder of Lovesocial; Shaun Zacharia, 26, and his partner Ari Lewine, 26, co-founders of the New York-based TripleLift; Shama Hyder, 29, founder of The Marketing Zen Group based in the Dallas/Fort Worth area in Texas; Awad Sayeed, 24, of San Francisco, and Kyle Wong, 24, co-founders of Pixlee, a visual marketing company that helps companies easily curate photos from real customers, rather than use stock photos; and Asha Sharma, 26, CMO at Porch in the Greater Seattle area.
Listed in the Energy category for “mixing the clean and the dirty for what comes next in energy,” are 16-year-old Deepika Kurup of Nashua, New Hampshire, who invented an inexpensive method of purifying water that utilizes sunlight and a photo-catylytic composite of titanium dioxide and silver nitrate; Shyam Gollakota, 29, assistant professor at University of Washington; Chicago-born, Mumbai-based Anish Harish Thakkar, 29, co-founder of GreenlightPlanet, which produces a solar-powered LED lantern called the Sun King and in five years has sold 3 million of them to families in Africa and South Asia and Tejas Shastry, 25, of Chicago, and his partners Alex Smith, 29, and Mike Geier, 28, co-founders of Ampy, a wearable lithium-ion battery that harnesses kinetic energy to charge itself while you move.
Named in the Venture Capital category, Nitesh Banta, 28, of the Greater Boston area and his partner Peter Boyce, 24, co-founders of Rought Draft Ventures have helped more than 30 startups to receive up to $25,000 to state a company and go on to raise $70 million in later investment through the fund.
Listed in the same section are Neil Chheda, 28, and Krishna Gupta, 27, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, co-founders of Romulus Capital, where they recently raised a $50 million fund to invest in early-stage startups. Gupta raised his first Romulus Fund in 2008 while a student at MIT.
Others who are “investing in great companies” include Toronto-born Gaurav Jain, 29, principal at the Boston-based Founder Collective; Arun Mathew, 29, principal at Accel Partners in the Bay Area; Chetan Puttangunta, 28, partner at New Enterprise Associates, also in the Bay Area; and Nikhil Basu Trivedi, 25, a senior associate at Shasta Ventures in San Francisco.
Anjuli Bedekar Calvert, 28, the lead industrial designer at GE appliances, based in Louisville, Kentucky; and Partha Unnava, 22, of Atlanta, CEO of Better Walk, are listed in the Manufacturing and Industry category for “modernizing the way things are made in a greener, tech-savvy world.”
Bedekar Calvert is credited for designing a low-gloss matte finish called “slate,” which won several awards and is now one of GE Appliance’s top-selling products, while Unnava has designed crutches that allow people using them to rest without having them dig into their underarms.
In the Healthcare section, those who are “going digital” include Nikhil Agarwal, assistant professor of economics at MIT; Cambridge University student Neha Kinariwalla, 21, founder of the Humanology Project; and Mahiben Maruthappu, 26, senior fellow to the CEO at London’s National Health Service (NHS).
Social Entrepreneurs who are “leveraging business tools to solve the world’s most pressing problems” include the Mauritius-born, Columbia-based Avnish Gungadurdoss, 28, and his partner Mike Belinsky, 29, co-founders of Instiglio, whose projects in India, Mexico, Chile, Columbia and Ecuador fight diabetes, educate girls, work to close the high school enrollment gap, and boost job opportunities for the poor; Minhaj Chowdhury 25, of Boston, co-founder of Drinkwell, which aims to clean up drinking for some of the 200 million people in Bangladesh and India whose water is contaminated by arsenic and fluoride; the Rwanda-based Gayatri Datar, 29, co-founder, EarthEnable, which installs a healthy alternative: gravel, clay, sand, and oil floors that are cheaper than concrete, safer than dirt; and Fiza Farhan, 28, co-founder of the Buksh Foundation, a microfinance institution that brings clean energy projects to poor, rural, areas of Pakistan.
The Enterprise Technology category includes the San Francisco-based Ishaan Gulrajani, 20, co-founder of Watchsend, which allows developers to record users’ phone screens in order to learn and improve their app; Om Marwah, 25, cognitive scientist at Walmart Labs, who is applying his academic background in cognitive science and geography to online marketing; and Vivek Ravishankar, 27, co-founder of HackerRank, a service companies can use to host coding challenges to find new engineering talent; as well as Vinith Misra, 27, research staff member of the IBM Watson Group in Stanford, California, who is studying machine learning, data mining, and natural language processing.
While most of the categories included several Indians, there were some which saw only one among the 30 listed. Those include Avinash Gandhi, 29, an agent at WME in Los Angeles (Hollywood and Entertainment); British national Ishveen Anand, 29, founder of the New York-based OpenSponsorship, an online platform to facilitate sponsorship agreements by connecting brands with pro sports rights holders like leagues, teams and even athletes (Sports); Vijay Chudasama, 28, of Harrow, U.K., co-founder of Thiologcs (Science); and Apoorva Mehta, 28, of San Francisco, founder of Instacart, the fastest-growing grocery delivery service.