5 Indian Americans who are the richest self-made women in America

Jayshree Ullal, Neerja Sethi, Neha Narkhede, Indra Nooyi, Reshma Shetty among 100 women on Forbes 2022 list

Of the 100 women on Forbes’ 2022 list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women, the figures of five Indian-American women have a combined net worth of $111 billion.

According to US business magazine, they have made their fortunes in various industries including entertainment, healthcare, technology, cosmetics and fashion. The minimum net worth he needed to make the list this year was $215 million.

Read: 6 of the 100 most influential women in US finance are Indian Americans (March 8, 2022)

Since 2008, the top Indian-American has been Jayshree Ullal, 61, president and CEO of Arista Networks, a computer networking company. With her net worth of $1.7 billion, she ranks 15th on her list.

Neerja Sethi, 67, who co-founded the IT consulting and outsourcing company Syntel with her husband Bharat Desai in a Troy, Michigan apartment in 1980, ranks 24th with a net worth of $1 billion.

37-year-old Neha Narkhede, CTO and co-founder of Confluent, is number 57 with a net worth of $490 million. Indra Nooyi, 66, former chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, comes next with a net worth of $320 million. She is number 85.

Reshma Shetty, 41, co-founder of Gingko Bioworks, a synthetic biotech firm with a net worth of $220 million, was ranked 97th.

“This list celebrates women who have found success in business despite constant challenges,” said Kelly A. Dolan, Assistant Managing Editor of Wealth at Forbes. “Every year, new entrepreneurs join our ranks and inspire us with their stories of how they built their companies.”

Read: 5 Indian Americans on Forbes 2021 list of richest self-made women (August 13, 2021)

Born in London and raised in India, Ural studied electrical engineering at San Francisco State University, while Diane Hendricks topped the list five years in a row and last year became the first American woman with a net worth of over $10 billion. I was. She studied business administration at Santa Clara University.

Ullal joined Arista with no revenue and fewer than 50 employees. She joined the board of directors of Snowflake, her cloud computing company that went public in September 2020.

Public company revenues were $2.3 billion in 2020, down nearly 4% from fiscal 2019. Ullal owns about 5% of her Arista stake, part of which is allocated to her two children, a niece and nephew.

In August 2018, Arista settled a multi-year patent infringement lawsuit with Cisco, Ullal’s former employer, agreeing to pay Cisco $400 million.

“As human beings, we all want to do a good job, be recognized, and be appreciated. Treat your colleagues and team with respect, nurture your inner strength, and maximize your potential.” ‘ she said.

Sethi’s Syntel was acquired by French IT company Atos SE for $3.4 billion in October 2018. Since 1980 he has been an executive at Syntel, Sethi did not join Atos after the takeover.

Sethi met her husband in the US while working for Tata Consultancy Services, a pioneering IT company. The couple started the business with just her $2,000 initial investment.

Read: Meet the top 3 richest Indian-American women (July 1, 2021)

Sethi has a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, a Master’s degree in Computer Science, and an MBA in Operations Research.

Raised in Pune, India, Nakede studied Computer Science at Georgia Tech and currently advises numerous technology startups. As an engineer at LinkedIn Software, he helped develop the open source messaging system Apache Kafka, which handles the massive influx of data for network sites.

In 2014, she and two LinkedIn colleagues left the company to found Confluent to help organizations process large amounts of data with Apache Kafka. The $388 million (revenue) company will go public in June 2021 when she is valued at $9.1 billion. She and her family own about 8%.

Nooyi grew up in India and after earning an MBA from Yale University, became one of the few female CEOs of US companies in 2006.

As CEO, she blocked the PepsiCo split, nearly doubled sales, and introduced healthier products and greener practices. Her fortune stems from her stake given to her while she was working at PepsiCo. Nooyi said that in 2019 she joined Amazon’s board of directors.

She became the top alumni donor to the Yale Business School after donating an undisclosed amount in 2016.

Shetty got her PhD in bioengineering from MIT and met the other co-founders of Ginkgo Bioworks. Named after a tree from the age of the dinosaurs, Ginkgo biloba uses data analytics and robotics to speed up the process of discovering and creating new organisms.

Read: 5 Indian Americans who are the richest self-made women in America (July 2022)

Ginkgo Bioworks went public in September 2021 through a SPAC merger. The stock has fallen 80% from its November peak to mid-May 2022. As Covid-19 spread, the company opened its Boston facility to ramp up coronavirus research and disease testing.

“We didn’t start Ginkgo to make money, or because we wanted to be ‘founders’ or because we thought it was cool.We did it because we wanted it to be faster, cheaper and easier [to do research]said Shetty.