Several Indian Americans Among 600 Entrepreneurs, Innovators and Entertainers in Forbes List of 30 Under 30
- They feature in almost all categories including Marketing & Advertising, Retail and E-commerce, Science and Consumer Technology.
Several Indian Americans in Forbes 30 Under 30 Several Indian Americans are among Forbes 30 Under 30, a list which is released on Dec. 1 each year to honor and showcase the top people under 30 years old in different industries.
Forbes says its 10th anniversary ‘Forbes Under 30’ class “is set to define the next decade — and beyond.” The magazine says that while “much of 2022 was being freshly created by this group back in 2012, ten years from today, it’s a good bet we’ll all be living in a new world being imagined today by the 600 entrepreneurs, innovators and entertainers that make up our 10th Anniversary class.”
Indian Americans, as well as South Asian Americans and Indo-Canadians feature in almost all categories. Here we highlight those who made in diverse fields like Marketing & Advertising, Retail and E-commerce, Science and Consumer Technology.
Listed in the Marketing & Advertising category is Trevor Sookraj, 24, founder of Divisional, a growth marketing firm dedicated to promoting startups. Sookraj told Forbes that his company provides startups a full growth team of Divisional employees at a fraction of the traditional cost. “Their outsourcing model has been lucrative, with revenue growing 240% this year to $1.5 million,” the magazine says. Before founding Divisional, he was a part of the growth team at Clearbit in San Francisco working to grow their self-serve products. Before that, he was a sales intern at Shopify and a marketing analyst at Turnstyle Solutions, which was acquired by Yelp.
Sookraj grew up in Canada and is the eldest son of a Guyanese father and an Indian mother. “My dad came to Canada at a relatively early age from Guyana (a Caribbean nation), and spent the entirety of his adult life in this country,” he writes in a blog on his website. “My mom came to Canada at the age of 17 from Goa (India) — a Portuguese colony. Her maiden name is Portuguese and she was raised Catholic.”
Raunak Nirmal, the co-founder of Acquo, one of the largest and fastest-growing aggregators of companies that sell on Amazon, features in the Retail and E-commerce section along with Akshar Bonu, co-founder of The Custom Movement; Tejas Konduru, cofounder of VIA; and Vinay Menda and his partner Issam Freiha of Blank Street.
Like Sookraj, Raunak Nirmal, 29, also grew up in Canada, having moved there from India at age 7. Now based in New York, the Sikh American has raised $160 million to acquire businesses that will generate some $250 million in revenue this year. “I’ve been living and breathing Amazon,” he told old Forbes. Nirmal worked as an analyst at Amazon right out of college and started several Amazon companies himself. Now he’s scaling others’ products, a process that includes expanding beyond Amazon to sites such as Walmart, Target and Best Buy. “We assume that the opportunity goes beyond simply acquiring a large number of brands on Amazon,” he told Forbes. “We believe that converting these brands into true omnichannel brands represents the true potential of these brands.”
Akshar Bonu, 26, who was required to wear a uniform during high school in the Philippines viewed sneakers as his primary form of self-expression. He turned that obsession into a business. He now runs an online sneaker marketplace, where customers can order custom shoes from thousands of independent artists around the world. The Custom Movement takes a 10% cut on each sale.
Tejas Konduru, 26, started Via to help retailers engage with customers on the device they carry around all day: Their mobile phone. Via puts together campaigns on mobile-native channels like apps, text and direct messages on Facebook and Instagram. Konduru has raised $75 million from Tiger Global and others, and projects revenue will quadruple to $10 million in 2021.
Coffee lovers Vinay Menda and Issam Freiha are reimagining the coffee cart, offering fast and affordable coffee that doesn’t sacrifice taste, as well as eats from local vendors. Blank Street has 15 locations in New York City, with plans to expand to 100 locations in other cities in 2022. It has raised $32 million from General Catalyst and Tiger Global.
The science category includes Srijan Kumar, 29, Assistant Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology; Pranav Rajpurkar, 26, Assistant Professor, Harvard University; and Shruti Rijhwani, 28, Ph.D. Candidate, Carnegie Mellon University.
Srijan Kumar, who wants to make the internet a safer place, develops data science and machine learning solutions to combat malicious actors like fraudsters and troll armies. His research is used by Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce platform, and has influenced Twitter’s Birdwatch platform.
Pranav Rajpurkar leads a lab focused on artificial intelligence applications for health, including deep learning algorithms for reading chest X-rays and electrocardiograms that can make diagnoses on par with humans. His research has more than 10,000 citations and he also co-hosts the AI Health Podcast.
Shruti Rijhwani is developing natural language processing technologies to help communities revitalize endangered languages. UNESCO classifies at least 40% of the world’s 7,000 languages as endangered. Rijhwani’s algorithms help extract text from non-digitized books and handwritten documents and make them accessible online.
Tulsee Doshi, product lead for Google’s ML Fairness and Responsible AI efforts is listed here. The 27-year-old studied AI at Stanford before joining Google, where she’s spearheaded the launch of more than 30 products that help make the company’s AI-based initiatives safer and more inclusive. Alongside Engineering VP Marian Croak, Doshi established and now leads an internal organization of more than 100 AI researchers and engineers.
Joining Doshi is another young woman – 28-year-old Uttara Sivaram, Global Head of Privacy & Security Public Policy at Uber. Forbes says “Sivaram pulls off a tricky balancing act.” As Uber’s Global Head of Privacy & Security Policy, she “guards the $73 billion ride-hailing company’s ever-moving trove of rider and driver information,” and also “partners with local governments and law enforcement to safely manage data that influences traffic plans, infrastructure and public safety.” Before Uber, the Stanford grad was a product manager for Bidgely, a software maker for utilities.
Also listed Sid Yadav, 29, co-founder of Circle. Previously VP of Product at Teachable, Yadav founded Circle to give creators a single place to manage their brands and fanbases. “Since then, Circle has signed up more than 2 million users including Bozoma Saint John and Brendon Burchard and more than 4,000 businesses paying $39 to $399 for access,” according to Forbes.