New York: Several Indian Americans are featured in the recently-released Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ list for 2022. “It’s the 10th anniversary of the Forbes Under-30 class, which is set to define the next decade — and beyond,” a Forbes report on December 1 read.
All the honorees in the Forbes Under-30 Class of 2022 have defied the odds, it noted, “navigating a global pandemic, supply chain crunches and isolation to build ventures that are resilient and destined to change the world.”
In the category of Retail & E-commerce, Tejas Konduru found a place on the “Forbes 30 under 30” list for 2022. Kondaru’s start-up named Via, helps retailers engage with customers on their mobile devices. He has raised $75 million from Tiger Global and others, and projects revenue will quadruple to $10 million in 2021.
Raunak Nirmal, the co-founder of Acquoco, is also featured in this category on the list. Acquco is one of the largest and fastest-growing aggregators of companies that sell on Amazon, according to Forbes. Nirmal has raised $160 million to acquire businesses that will generate some $250 million in revenue this year. “I’ve been living and breathing Amazon,” says Nirmal, who worked as an analyst at Amazon straight out of college and started several Amazon companies himself. Nirmal had emigrated from India when he was seven years old.
Other entrepreneurs in the Retail & Ecommerce category include Vinay Menda and Issam Freiha, co-founders of Blank Street; Akshar Bonu, co-founder of The Custom Movement, an online sneaker marketplace; Aadil Kazmi, co-founder of Swyft.
In the category of Music, Trevor Sookraj found a place on the list. Founder of Divisional, he is hoping that his “marketer-first” agency can provide 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.
That is not all; six Indian Americans have been named in Forbes’ ’30 Under 30′ list 2022 under the Science and Consumer Technology categories. Three were named in the Science category while three have been named in the Consumer Technology category.
The coveted list of science includes Srijan Kumar, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, whose research has influenced Twitter’s Birdwatch platform; Pranav Rajpurkar, an assistant professor at Harvard. Rajpurkar leads a lab focused on artificial intelligence applications for health; and Shruti Rijhwani, a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University. Rijhwani’s algorithms help extract text from non-digitized books and handwritten documents and make them accessible online.
The Consumer Technology list includes Tulsee Doshi, who studied AI at Stanford before joining Google; Uttara Sivaram, Uber’s Global Head of Privacy & Security Policy; and, Sid Yadav, previously VP of Product at edtech Teachable, who founded Circle to give creators a single place to manage their brands and fan bases. 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.
