From Jayshree Ullal to Neerja Sethi, 5 Indian-origin women in America’s richest self-made women list

Five Indian-origin women feature in the Forbes Annual list of America's most richest self-made women list. According to the US business magazine, they have made their fortunes in a variety of businesses such as entertainment, healthcare, technology, cosmetics, fashion, and others. This year's list required a minimum net worth of $215 million.

1. Jayshree Ullal

Born in London and raised in India, Ullal studied electrical engineering at San Francisco State University and tops the list for the fifth consecutive year and last year became the first self-made woman in America to boast a fortune of $10 billion or more.

Ullal joined Arista when it had no revenues and fewer than 50 employees. She joined the board of directors of Snowflake, a cloud computing company that went public in September 2020.

The publicly-traded company reported revenue of $ 2.3 billion in 2020, down nearly 4% from 2019. Ullal owns about 5% of Arista's stock, some of which is assigned to her two children, a niece and a nephew.

2. Neerja Sethi

Sethi’s Syntel was bought by French IT firm Atos SE for $3.4 billion in October 2018. Sethi got an estimated $510 million for her stake. Sethi, who had served as an executive at Syntel since 1980, did not join Atos after the acquisition.

Sethi met her husband in the U.S. while working for pioneering IT firm Tata Consultancy Services, which they attempted to emulate. The couple started the business with an initial investment of just $2,000.

3. Neha Narkede

Narkhede grew up in Pune and studied Computer Science at Georgia Tech, and today advises many technology start-ups. As a LinkedIn software engineer, she helped develop Apache Kafka, an open-source messaging system for handling the influx of heavy traffic on network sites.

In 2014, she and two LinkedIn colleagues left to found Confluent, which helps organizations process large amounts of data on Apache Kafka. The $388 million (revenues) company went public in June 2021 at a $9.1 billion valuation; she and her family own around 8%.

4. Indra Nooyi

Nooyi grew up in India and got an MBA from Yale before becoming one of corporate America’s few female CEOs in 2006. She retired from PepsiCo in 2019 after 24 years, half of which she spent in the top job.

As CEO, she resisted a plan to break up PepsiCo, nearly doubled sales, and implemented healthier goods and ecologically responsible methods. Her fortune is derived from shares she received while working at PepsiCo. In 2019, Nooyi joined the board of Amazon in 2019.

She became a top alumni donor to Yale’s business school after giving an undisclosed amount in 2016.

5. Reshma Shetty

Shetty received a PhD in biological engineering at MIT. There she met other co-founders of Ginkgo Bioworks. Named after a dinosaur-era tree, Ginkgo uses data analysis and robotics to speed up the process of discovering and creating new creatures.

Ginkgo Bioworks went public in a SPAC merger in September 2021. Its shares fell 80% from their peak in November through mid-May 2022. As Covid-19 spread, the company opened its Boston facilities for research into the coronavirus and to ramp up testing for the disease.