Results (228 found)

WomenMay 24, 2026

The Artist Who Taught Machines to See: How Ashwini Asokan Left Silicon Valley, Built a Global AI Company from a Chennai Apartment, and Refused to Be the Only Woman in the Room

In 2012, Ashwini Asokan was living the life she had been trained for. She had a master's degree in interaction design from Carnegie Mellon, one of the world's most selective programmes. She had a research position at Intel Labs in Silicon Valley, where she worked on the frontiers of computer vision—teaching machines to recognise objects, faces, and gestures. She was good at it. She was well-paid. She was, by any conventional measure, on exactly the right trajectory for someone with her credentials and her ambition.

WomenMay 24, 2026

The Stanford Engineer Who Survived India's Fintech Crash: How Upasana Taku Remortgaged Her Home, Survived a 96% Valuation Collapse, and Took a $450 Million Company Public

In the winter of 2016, Upasana Taku sat at her kitchen table in Gurugram and calculated how long her company had to live. The answer was eight weeks. MobiKwik, the digital payments platform she had co-founded seven years earlier with her husband Bipin Preet Singh, was burning through its remaining cash at a rate that would exhaust its reserves by February. The Indian startup ecosystem was in the grip of a funding winter so severe that once-celebrated unicorns were collapsing into fire sales. Venture capitalists who had once returned her calls within hours were no longer answering. The valuation at which she had raised her last round — a number she no longer speaks about publicly, but which industry sources placed at roughly $250 million — had become a liability rather than an asset. No new investor would touch the company at anything close to that price. No existing investor was willing to lead a bridge. The only people who believed MobiKwik would survive were the two people sitting at the kitchen table.

WomenMay 24, 2026

The Engineer Who Was Told to "Stay in the Kitchen": How Vimala Raju Built a ₹200 Crore Electronics Empire by Refusing to Listen

In 1995, Vimala Raju walked into a bank in Hyderabad to apply for a loan. She was 24 years old, had a degree in electrical engineering from Osmania University, and carried a business plan for a company that would manufacture industrial power supplies—the unsung components that convert electricity into the precise voltages required by everything from factory machinery to medical equipment. The loan officer looked at her, looked at the application, and asked a question she has never forgotten. "Why don't you just stay in the kitchen?"

WomenMay 24, 2026

She Poured ₹5 Lakh Into a Bottle of Onion Oil. Today, She Runs a ₹150 Crore Vegan Beauty Empire—Without a Single Rupee of Venture Capital.

Rupali Sharma was not supposed to be a beauty mogul. She was a mother, recovering from childbirth, watching clumps of her hair fall out in the shower and feeling, as millions of women before her have felt, that her body was betraying her in ways no one had warned her about. She tried the conventional remedies. They failed. In desperation, she turned to the one person whose advice had never let her down: her grandmother, who told her to apply onion extract to her scalp.

WomenMay 24, 2026

She Was Sleeping on the Floor Nine Months Ago. Today, the 23-Year-Old Who Pitched a Silicon Valley Titan for 20 Minutes Just Doubled Her Startup's Valuation to $200 Million.

In February, Anjali Sardana flew to San Francisco with a backpack and a pitch. She was 23 years old, had been running a company for roughly eight months, and had secured a twenty-minute meeting with Lachy Groom, one of Silicon Valley's most closely watched solo investors, through a mutual connection. Groom had backed Stripe, Figma, and Zepto. He co-founded Physical Intelligence, the robotics startup valued in the billions. He did not take meetings with just anyone. Sardana had prepared intensively, the way a former Bain Capital analyst prepares for anything — thoroughly, methodically, leaving nothing to chance.

StartupsMay 24, 2026

The Headphones That Read Your Mind: How Two Indian Women Built an AI-Powered Neurotech Wearable That Reduces Stress in Real Time

The headphones look ordinary. They sit over the ears like any premium audio device, the kind worn by millions of commuters and office workers every day. But inside the ear cups, a system of sensors, electrodes, and adaptive artificial intelligence is doing something no consumer headphone has ever done. It is reading the wearer's brainwaves. It is tracking their heart rate variability in real time. It is detecting the subtle physiological shifts that signal rising stress, fading focus, or the onset of mental fatigue. And then, quietly, without the wearer ever pressing a button, it is responding—adjusting neurostimulation protocols, modulating binaural beats, delivering pre

WomenMay 24, 2026

From Investor to Founder: How Aparna Saxena’s AntiNorm Raised Fresh Capital by Betting Against Beauty Industry Complexity

AntiNorm’s funding round increasingly reflects broader conversations around functional beauty, changing consumer behavior and why simplicity itself is becoming investable.

WomenMay 24, 2026

From an “Unplanned” Newspaper Ad to the C-Suite: How Blue Dart’s Sonia Nair Is Building India’s First Women-Run Logistics Hubs and Rewriting the Rules of Leadership

Sonia Nair’s journey increasingly reflects broader conversations around women leadership, workplace representation and changing assumptions inside traditional industries.

WomenMay 24, 2026

Motherhood, Money and the Modern Indian Workplace: How Women Are Rewriting the Rules of Leadership and Independence

Motherhood increasingly appears reshaping workplace leadership conversations, raising broader questions around financial systems, professional identity and how capability itself gets recognized.

WomenMay 24, 2026

Meet Ankita Vashistha: The Venture Capitalist Quietly Proving That Women Founders Mean Business

Ankita Vashistha’s work increasingly highlights broader conversations around women founders, startup funding and how venture ecosystems identify opportunity.