Young Indian Americans in Enterprise Technology, Education, and Energy Sectors Feature in Forbes 30 Under 30 List

The 10th annual Forbes 30 Under 30 list includes hundreds of trailblazers in diverse fields. Whether it’s Enterprise Technology, Education, or Energy, the Indian Americans featured in these categories have already excelled in their fields and show promise for a stellar future. 

Some of the startups are being led by immigrants like Obviously AI, whose co-founders, Nirman Dave and Tapojit Debnath Tapu are from India and Bangladesh respectively. Or like the team leading Arize AI, where three of the eight founding partners are women immigrants. Aparna Dhinakaran, Manisha Sharma and Tsion Behailu are part of the Arize AI founding team (along with five others, all over 30). Behailu was born in Ethiopia, Dhinakaran in India and Sharma in Fiji. Arize AI enables customers to monitor the performance of AI models using software that looks for things such as unforeseen biases in algorithms. According to Forbes, it has $24.5 million in funding from Battery Ventures, Foundation Capital and Trinity Ventures, among others.

AI, founded by Dave and Tapu, both Hampshire College alums, enables people without technical knowledge to build AI models that can be integrated into existing cloud services and databases. The company founded in 2019 has $4.7 million in funding and more than 3,000 users.

Rahul Sengottuvelu and Yunyu Lin are co-founders of Cohere, which allows customer-support and onboarding teams to view and control customers’ computer screens without any need for clients to download remote access code. It has $3.5 million in funding. 

Ganesh Datta, Anish Dhar and Nikhil Unni are co-founders of cortex which helps developers and engineers explore, understand, and operate the microservices used in building applications. Its platform documents service architecture, audits service health and prevents outages. With $17.5 million in funding, the co-founders plan to use their platform to guide other founders and help them along the way.

Krish Ramineni and Sam Udotong founded Fireflies.ai to make virtual meetings easy for participants. Their cloud-based technology automatically transcribes and takes bullet notes from user calls and meetings, identifying key takeaways from the transcription. Over 300,000 organizations and 2.5 million people have received AI-generated meeting notes from Fireflies.ai.

Ashwin Sreenivas, 26, is the founder of Campfire. As a teenager, Sreenivas won two gold medals for India in the International Junior Science Olympiad. In 2020, he built Campfire during the Covid-19 pandemic, to keep online communities strongly connected. The company’s community-building platform allows clients to broadcast messages to relevant community members while storing all member responses centrally.

Those making strides in the field of education include Aditya Vishwanath and Amrutha Vasan, Rohan Gupta and Simran Singh with partners Simon Komlos and Bolun Li. 

Inspirit was created in 2019 by Vishwanath and Vasan, both Georgia Tech graduates, to provide a user-generated collection of K-12 science coursework and supplements such as virtual labs and VR simulations, using video to hold the attention of young users. The business, based in Palo Alto, California, has raised $3.6 million and the staff has grown to 32 full-timers in the U.S., India, Russia, Israel and the Philippines. The basic service is free. Instructors can set their own price on premium features, for which the platform keeps a 20% cut.

Rohan Gupta, along with David Silin and Anil Jason, founded the AI writing startup Quillbot in 2017. This August, the Chicago-Based venture was sold to Course Hero, “a year after $4.25 million in a seed funding round,” according to Forbes. When users paste in text, Quillbot’s AI can paraphrase writing to improve syntax and style, summarize long papers and articles to pull out the main ideas, check spelling and grammar or create citations. “It has 10 million monthly active users, many using its free products and some paying a premium,” adds Forbes.

Zogo Finance, co-founded by Simran Singh, Simon Komlos and Bolun Li, engages, educates and earns the trust of young adults, teaching financial literacy using a gamified smartphone app. Users can earn rewards such as gift cards. “More than 62 banks and 350,000 individual customers have used Zogo since its founding in 2019,” Forbes says, adding that the Zogo Finance team has grown to 22 full-timers.

Listed in the Energy category is Sid Bhattacharya, 29, Worldwide Head of Products & Solutions at Amazon. He founded and leads the division of Amazon Web Services that caters to the energy industry, helping the operators of oil & gas operations, chemical plants, renewable energy projects and even nuclear plant operators.

Joining him are Anurag Kamal and Folasade Ayoola, who in 2020, founded ElectricFish, which has developed and patented a battery storage-integrated EV charging system that can plug into existing, ubiquitous electrical infrastructure like at gas stations to provide an easily installed, ultrafast EV charger. 

Also included is Tara Gupta, 26, founder of Anamakos, a sustainable real estate development startup. She is also the founder and CEO of Map-Collective, a green-tech startup that digitally tracks and maps environmental data and users’ carbon footprints. Map-Collective has $130,000 in funding to date and is in talks with some 200 companies with plans to grow a robust system of carbon tracking within the next 10 years.

Deepak Atyam of Tri-D joins the list along with co-founders Alex Finch and Jesse Lang. The trio is utilizing a novel “melt-less” metal 3D printing tech called Cold Metal Fusion to integrate sensors, communication and power protocols directly into metal structures, such as oil and gas pipelines. This year, they sold their company to Australia’s Titomic.

This section also includes Sakshi Mishra, 29, a staff researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia. Her research is focused on harnessing AI for solving clean energy integration challenges, and her work led to the deployment of a neural net-based tool for accurately predicting the energy consumption of buildings.