Forbes released a list of America’s richest self-made women in June, ranking women from different fields, requiring a minimum net worth of $215 million. And this year’s list has five women of Indian origin, who made it to the top 100.
Here are the five women who have worked hard to make a mark, and shatter glass ceilings with their work and dedication towards it.
1. Indra Nooyi
Indra Nooyi joined Pepsico in 1994 as senior vice president of corporate strategy and development. and worked for 24 years in the company, half of which she spent as the CEO of the company. She retired in 2019 and is since then served on the board of Amazon.
In her illustrious career at Pepsico, Nooyi bought many changes and introduced healthier products and greener initiatives. She also resisted a break-up option of Pepsico, and under her leadership, sales skyrocketed to almost double.
On America’s Self-made richest women, Indra Nooyi is ranked number 85 with a net worth of $320 million.
2. Neha Narkhede
The co-founder of Confluent, Neha helped co-create the open-source software platform Apache Kafka. to handle the networking site’s humongous data influx.
Today, Neha is playing the role of a mentor to many technology startups. She now serves as a board member of Confluent. The $388 million (revenues) company went public in June 2021 at a $9.1 billion valuation; she and her family own around 8%. She is in the 57th position among the richest self-made women in America.
3. Jayshree Ullal
Jayshree joined Arista at a time when the company had no revenues and less than 50 employees. Today, she heads the company.
Jayshri joined the board of directors of Snowflake, a cloud computing company that went public in September 2020, and this publicly-traded company reported revenue of $ 2.3 billion in 2020.
As of today, she owns 5% of Arista stocks, and this electrical engineer from San Francisco State University has become the first self-made woman in America to boast a fortune of $10 billion or more.
She is 15th on the list of America’s richest self-made women.
4. Reshma Shetty
Reshma Shetty co-founded synthetic biology Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc. in 2008. She has been active in the field of synthetic biology for more than a decade and also co-organized SB1.0, the first international conference in synthetic biology.
In 2014, her company became the first biotech company to participate in YCombinator. In 2018, she was named as one of the most powerful female engineers by Business Insider. She is ranked 97th on the list of America’s richest self-made women, with a net worth of $220 million.
5. Neerja Sethi
Co-founder of IT consulting and outsourcing firm Syntel, Neerja is 24th on the list of America’s self-made richest women. She started Syntel with an initial investment of just about $2000, with her husband Bharat Desai in an apartment in Troy in 1980.
Syntel was bought by French IT firm Atos SE for $3.4 billion in October 2018. For this, Neerja Sethi got an estimated $510 million for her stake. She did not join Atos after the acquisition.
She is ranked in 24th position on the list.
