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World Entrepreneur Day 2020: 8 Entrepreneurs and their contribution to the tech-startup industry

August 21st marks World Entrepreneur Day. It is a day dedicated solely to entrepreneurship, leadership and innovation across the globe.

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CIOL Bureau
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World Entrepreneurs' Day 2020

August 21st marks World Entrepreneur Day. It is a day dedicated solely to entrepreneurship, leadership and innovation across the globe. It is also a day that creates awareness about entrepreneurship, innovation and leadership across the world. Hereby introducing 8 Budding Tech Entrepreneurs who inspire us to aim for greater heights.

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1. Zishaan Hayath, Co-Founder, Toppr

A startup evangelist and a prominent figure in the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem, Zishaan Hayath is the Founder and CEO of Toppr. The platform provides personalized learning for students studying for boards, Olympiads, and various engineering and medical competitive exams. With the backing of SAIF Partners, Helion Ventures and Fidelity Investments, his motive with Toppr is to personalize learning for students by leveraging best-in-class technology.

Besides Toppr, Zishaan is a serial angel investor and has mentored a few Indian startups including Olacabs, Chaayos &a BiteClub. He also runs a highly-regarded angel investment group called Powai Lake Ventures.

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2. Anushka Shetty, Co-founder of Plop Stories

Anushka was working with Pricewaterhouse Coopers when she realized a major transition that has occurred in her life. An alum of IIM Bangalore, Anushka used to be an avid reader. But what had changed over time is that she hadn’t read a single book other than academics literature. Rather, she became a part of the mobile-first generation, spending most of her time on social media and texting apps. This inspired Anushka to reinvent storytelling and carve a new entertainment category for a smart-phone obsessed generation.

Brimming with ideas and a winning attitude, Anushka created a platform that merges the ancient art of storytelling with the millennial art of texting. Chartered Accountant by qualification, Anuska always wanted to get on to something with a creative bent. Thus, her journey from numbers to words started and Plop was founded in 2019. Plop is a global, mobile-first company that creates immersive and interactive fiction for a young audience. The IIM Bangalore-incubated startup is a part of the Goldman Sachs Startup Program.

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Anushka has been a winner of the Women Entrepreneur Quest 2019 by Anita Borg Institute, Govt. of India’s Department of Science & Technology, and Indo-US Science and Technology Forum. She was also the Speaker at Google’s Launchpad Women Founders’ Summit in 2020, and at Facebook F8 Conference 2019. Member of SheLeadsTech, an invitation-only community of female-led tech startups run by Facebook, Anushka’s interests are diversified. She has completed Grade 4 of Speech & Drama Course offered by Trinity College, London. During the lockdown phase, Anushka conducted a mask-donation drive and raised over $10,000 to provide 100,000 masks for frontline workers.

3. Atul Todi, Co-Founder, 10Times

Atul Todi is Co-Founder & CEO at 10times. It is an n in-person networking platform for professionals, connecting people via business events like tradeshows, conferences, workshops & meetups. In a digital world plagued with random connect requests and lack of meaningful business networking opportunities, he is focused on leveraging technology to bring people closer.

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In his present role, he is responsible for leading the development and execution of long-term strategies and making top-level managerial decisions associated with driving the overall success of the organization. A regular speaker at various conferences for the MICE industry and startups, he focuses on the vision to open opportunities for 3 billion working population via events and networking opportunities.

4. Shreya Mishra, Co-Founder of Flyrobe

Raised in a family of IAS officers and lawyers, Mishra never thought she’d venture into the world of business. However, her work experience as a financial analyst gave her insights into the market, the resources it takes to run a business and got her interested in developing a model that was relatively unexplored. Having always followed fashion trends, Mishra identified a big void in the fashion rental space.

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Flyrobe is a company that breathes fashion, eats technology, drinks logistics and makes a living by matching people with their next fashion dates.

5. Ankit Chaudhari, Founder, Aiisma

Having been an entrepreneur for over a decade, Ankit has garnered exceptional business acumen. Prior to founding Aiisma, Ankit established several technology-led organizations. These include Sapean, an IT and ITES Services provider; TechHeal Canada Inc, a complete solution suite for connected home troubleshooting support; eCedmy, India’s first initiative in e-commerce and business education and Technicion Inc, the partner of choice for premium technical support model of operations.

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At Aiisma, Ankit is looking to develop the company into a fully-fledged hard and software company that connects individuals to businesses in the data economy. Additionally, he aims to drive Aiisma to be the frontrunner in simplifying connected intelligence to the extent where social interactions, retail promotions, pandemic forecasts, job applications, and business processes can be managed within the Aiisma data ecosystem.

6. Aditi Avasthi, Founder of Embibe

Blossoming in the EdTech space, AI-backed online learning platform Embibe has managed to raise funding of Rs 90 crores by Reliance Industries. Founded by Aditi Avasthi, this platform was developed with Aditi’s passion for encouraging education in India with the help of AI.

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Aditi is one of the very few women who has begun an AI startup that makes optimal use of the technology to provide users with personalized recommendations to better their attempts. Her platform also makes use of data analytics to create customized learning modules for students. At the Economic Times Prime Women Leadership Awards 2019, Aditi was awarded the ‘Accenture Vaahini Innovator of The Year’

7. Rahul Bhattacharya, Co-Founder, Fun 2:

Rahul is a self-driven and extremely ambitious entrepreneur. With his team, he co-founded Fun2 to showcase and celebrate the diversity of Indian culture. It is an emerging social media video-sharing platform. It is made in India for Indian audiences to explore their art, present it to the world, and shape themselves as influencers or content creators in the process. As the Co-Founder and Director - Strategy at Fun2, Rahul works closely with the other promoters while devising the brand’s go-to-market strategies.

He also oversees various aspects of the business that can help achieve success and fulfilment of the start-up’s long-term goals. Rahul brings to the table over eighteen years of prolific experience spanning across Business Development, Growth Strategy, Consulting, and Commercial domains.

At Fun2, he is focusing all his energies at furthering the brand on its growth trajectory, achieving its long term goal of becoming the leading social media video-sharing platform in the country with operations in 20+ countries across Asia-Pacific in the next five years.

8. Falguni Nayyar, Founder of Nykaa

The founder of Nykaa.com, a beauty, and wellness e-commerce platform, has an experience of 25 years in financial services. Falguni Nayyar was the former Managing Director of Kotak Mahindra Group. After 25 years in the industry, she decided to take a leap of faith with Nykaa. A graduate from IIM Ahmedabad, Nayyar was extremely determined and focused to leave behind corporate life and begin something of her own.

Her hard work and diligence towards developing Nykaa showed results when top brands began signing up on their platform. L’Oreal, Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, etc were some big companies that tied up with the platform. Nykaa’s network currently is 850+ brands strong, making it a leading site for retail partnerships. With more funding raised by private investors, Nykaa plans to expand to more physical stores and also be available as a mobile application.