Indian American Venture Capitalists, Finance, Healthcare and Manufacturing & Industry Pros in Forbes 30 Under 30

Several young venture capitalists and financial experts are included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 for their achievements in the field. Also featured are healthcare professionals as well as those working in manufacturing and industry. 

Venture Capital

Gaurav Ahuja, 29, works double duty as both a partner at Thrive Capital and as founder and chairman of Imprint Payments. At Thrive, he focuses on fintech and SaaS across stages, serving as a board observer at LeafLink and as a board member at Check, dutchie, Parafin and Stytch.

Meera Clark, 28, Principal, Obvious Ventures joined the firm in 2019, where she focuses on companies in healthcare, fintech and employment opportunities. Clark leads her Obvious Ventures’ diversity initiatives, participating in HBCUvc’s Bay Area programming and setting sourcing and hiring strategies. A board member of the Stanford Professionals in Finance, she’s an avid writer, especially on the topic of enhancing economic empowerment for women. Clark previously worked at Morgan Stanley’s Multicultural Innovation Lab and in its tech investment banking group.

Maitree Mervana, 28, is an investor at Acrew Capital, a multi-stage venture capital firm founded by a group of investors including Theresia Gouw with nearly $1 billion in assets under management. She was the first hire on the investment team and joined at the closing of the first fund. She co-leads the consumer thesis area and seed program at Acrew and has led, co-led, or supported investments in 25-plus companies, deploying more than $130 million of capital. An immigrant and woman of color, she actively mentors and fosters community across young women to increase representation within the tech ecosystem and hopes to drive equitable capital distribution.

Asad Khaliq, 29, founding partner at Acrew Capital which recently announced its second early-stage fund as well as a growth-stage fund, reaching nearly $1 billion in assets under management within two years. He leads Acrew’s “data interconnected” investing practice, and sits on the board of Edge Impulse, System and Aira Technologies while working with others. Born in Pakistan, he recently led the firm’s first investment in a Pakistani startup. He also sits on the board of NextGen Partners.

Vinny Pujji, 29, is co-founder and managing partner at Left Lane Capital, Pujji led seven of the firm’s 28 investments from its $630 million debut fund, serving on the boards of Truebill and Copado. He manages Left Lane’s analyst and associate hiring program as the firm has passed 20 employees. Along with his co-founders, Pujji previously worked at Insight Partners. He’s deployed about $1 billion in capital across his career in 22 deals.

Finance

In early 2020, Ambika Acharya, 27, co-founded Weav, a fintech startup that aggregates sales data for small businesses and makes it accessible through an API, letting lenders see it in seconds to assess borrower risk. Brex was Weav’s first customer, using it to power its instant payouts feature, and in August this year, it bought Weav for $50 million. At Brex, Acharya is focused on bringing Weav’s e-commerce data to more of the company’s products.

As a data scientist at Sahana Athreya, 29, researches alternative datasets to provide investment insights. Her statistical and machine learning models have been crucial to a broad set of investment teams. When joining Millennium as an analyst, Athreya was instrumental in designing and implementing a platform that centralized trading data.

Ameer Shujjah and Albert Owusu-Asare both immigrated to the U.S.— Owusu-Asare from Ghana and Shujjah from Pakistan — and met on their first day of college, at Iowa-based Grinnell. In early 2021 they cofounded Cadana, which helps African workers access the daily wages they’ve earned, charging employers and employees $1 a month for unlimited access to earned wages. After launching in May 2021, Cadana has 60 employer-clients in Ghana and Nigeria and processes payments for 7,000 employees.

Akash Magoon, 25, did stints at Amazon Web Services and data consultancy Enigma before co-founding Nayya in 2019. The insurtech startup helps consumers pick the most cost-effective health insurance plan, find lower-cost pharmacies and use tax-efficient healthcare savings accounts more often. 

Rahul Raina, 28, co-founded TRM Labs which provides forensic analysis for the IRS and dozens of others. By charging for licenses that let customers identify where an asset came from, who owns it and score the risk of that owner, the firm has grown 700% since last year and is on track to generate several million dollars revenue this year.

Healthcare

Akilesh Bapu, 24, and his partner Matthew Ko, 36, co-founded DeepScribe, where they have built an AI-powered medical scribe that automates clinical documentation for physicians. The software listens to patient conversations and its AI fills out the medical forms, enabling doctors to spend more time with patients than on a computer screen. More than 500 clinicians across 44 states currently use the software.

Neal Khosla, 28, co-founded Curai, which uses AI to help improve the scale and efficiency of virtual care delivery. The goal is to make primary care accessible to the uninsured, gig and minimum-wage workers by cutting costs for both in-person and telehealth businesses. Founded in 2017, the company has raised nearly $60 million from investors.

Charu Sharma, 29, is co-founder and president of Osana Salud, which builds back-end infrastructure to digitize healthcare data for customers including healthcare providers, insurers and the pharmaceutical industry. It’s raised $26.5 million from investors and has a network of 6 million patients across Latin America, Spain and the U.S.

Shriya Srinivasan, 27, a researcher at MIT is developing better ways for human limbs to interact with prostheses through the use of brain-computer interfaces and tissue engineering. Her inventions enable patients to control their prostheses and receive sensory feedback signals about how the prosthesis is moving and what it’s touching. Around 30 amputation patients are using her surgical designs.

Kunaal Naik, Nisarg Patel and Manav Sevak are the cofounders of AI startup Memora Health, which has developed a patient engagement and workflow tool for healthcare providers. It includes functions like automated scheduling, billing, two-way texting and remote patient monitoring. More than 50 healthcare organizations pay a monthly subscription fee to use the software.

Manufacturing & Industry

Born in India and raised in Cincinnati, Rajat Bhageria started San Francisco-based Chef Robotics to automate food service. The nearly three-year-old firm has raised $7.7 million from Kleiner Perkins and others to bring robots to the kitchen with the goal of increasing production, enhancing consistency and minimizing food waste.

Through her climate tech company Bluebird Climate, Anisha Gupta, 29, aims to decarbonize the consumer products industry through her climate tech company Bluebird Climate. Bluebird is building software that is helping brands tackle the 95% of company emissions that live within their products and supply chains, and allows them to minimize the impact of their operations on the planet. Gupta, who previously worked at Unilever, has led her company to roll out its products to Glossier and other beauty and apparel brands.

As an undergrad at Northeastern University, Anvesh Gurijala worked on materials technology with classmate Michael Segal and professor Randall Erb. The result was Boston Materials, which was founded in 2016 and has since raised $14 million. Their first material, called Z-axis Fiber, made with reclaimed feedstock, is unlike any metal, polymer or composite and enables applications that include keeping electronics cool and making highly effective hydrogen fuel cells.

Rahul Gupta-Iwasaki and Mark Ulrich aim to build accessible giving infrastructure for every charity, donor, and developer through Every.org. For charities, Every.org provides free online tools that optimize peer-to-peer fundraising and processes donations of cash, cryptocurrencies, or stocks. For donors, Every.org enables them to explore and donate to over 1 million nonprofits. For developers, Every.org has a Charity API that allows them to easily create unique giving experiences.

Joining them is Indo-Canadian Devesh Bharadwaj, 27, founder, Pani Energy, who is tackling the worldwide clean water crisis with his Victoria, Canada-based company which optimizes water treatment plants to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and improve sustainability. The company has raised over $7 million from a mix of investment firms, private investors, and government agencies.