Released on August 5, the Forbes list of ‘America’s Richest Self-Made Women’ has featured as many as five Indian-American women. 15 newcomers have been featured on the Forbes rich list this year, including PepsiCo’s former CEO Indra Nooyi.
Among other Indian-Americans featured on the list are Jayshree Ullal, president and CEO of Arista Networks; Neerja Sethi, co-founder, Syntel; Neha Narkhede, co-founder and former chief technology officer of Confluent; and Reshma Shetty, co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks.
60-year-old Jayshree Ullal, who was raised in India, has been heading a computer networking firm called Arista Networks since 2008. With a net worth of $1.7 bn, Ullal stands 16th on the Forbes rich list. Ullal studied electrical engineering at San Francisco State University and engineering management at Santa Clara University.
With a net worth of $1 bn, 60-year-old Neerja Sethi stands at 26th place in the Forbes rich list. In 1980, Sethi and her husband Bharat Desai founded the IT consulting and outsourcing firm Syntel, which French IT firm Atos SE later bought for $3.4 billion in October 2018. Of this, Sethi got an estimated $510 million for her stake.
Neha Narkhede stands at 29th place in the Forbes rich list with a net worth of $925 mn. Narkhede, who grew up in Pune, is co-founder and former chief technology officer of cloud company Confluent. She has helped in developing the open-source messaging system Apache Kafka as a LinkedIn software engineer.
Narkhede and two of her LinkedIn colleagues left in 2014 to found Confluent, a company that went public in June 2021 at a $9.1 bn valuation. The company helps organisations process large amounts of data on Apache Kafka. Narkhede has studied Computer Science at Georgia Tech.
Reshma Shetty, 41, stands at 39th position in the Forbes rich list with a net worth of $750 mn. She is the co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks, a synthetic biotechnology company. Reshma Shetty holds a PhD in biological engineering at MIT.
With a net worth of $290 mn, Indra Nooyi stands at 91st position in the Forbes rich list. She has served as CEO and chair of PepsiCo for 12 years before eventually stepping down. In 2019, she joined Amazon’s board.
