30 Under 30 2022: Special mentions to look out for

Agritech

Co-founder and COO

Samarth Setia and Abhishek Goel started Mr Milkman, an app to help the local milk vendor manage his customers, in 2015 to resolve logistics, infrastructure and traceability issues in the dairy sector. Today, it is one of the leading dairy SaaS solutions in India. After multiple rounds of fund raising and turning profitable last year, the company was acquired by Dairy.com, America’s leading dairy technology provider.

Art

Osheen Siva, 28

Artist

Self-taught artist Osheen Siva has worked as a researcher and graphic designer for many years, while working on personal art projects. She is enamoured by the ability to communicate through the visual medium, which she finds flexible, democratic and limitless. She is interested in creating worlds where her communities feel empowered and represented. “It is important for me to celebrate, and create Dalit and queer characters and narratives that are fully formed and are often ignored in the main stream,” she says.

Clean Energy & Climate Change special mention

Javed Khatri | Age: 28

Chief Product Officer,  eBikeGo

Javed Khatri, the Chief Product Officer at electric two-wheeler mobility platform eBikeGo came on board when his company Kustard was acquired at $2 million (₹14.8 crore). Kustard was set up by him along with two school friends. Born and bought up in the slums of Mumbai, Khatri's father is a carpenter and mother, a housewife. As a computer science graduate, he works on climate tech.

“We are team of passionate designers, engineers and product guys on a mission to save the planet. Every line of code that we write, every pixel we design, every feature we ship moves the needle and contributes towards greener future,” says Khatri.

At eBikeGo, Khatri and his team are building the world's first Operating System (OS) specifically for electric vehicles (think Android or Apple OS but for EVs) which they hope “is going to completely change the way people commute”. His ambitious five-year plan is that major OEMs will adopt their OS for their EV offerings.

Consumer Tech

Nimish Goel, 28

Co-founders, TrueFan

TrueFan is a celebrity fan-engagement startup that connects fans with celebrities through personalised, interactive experiences. It has over 1.5 million users and exclusive partnership with biggies such as Ranveer Singh. “We want to build India’s largest marketplace for fans and celebrities,” says Nimish Goel. TrueFan raised $4.3 million in seed funding from Mayfield India, Saama Capital, and Ronnie Screwvala.

Cryptocurrency

Ajay Prashanth,

Co-founder and Product-Ecosystem Growth, bitsCrunch

Founded in 2020, bitsCrunch is an NFT-focussed blockchain analytics company that aims to solve issues in the NFT space particularly forgeries, copycats, wash-trading and inefficient asset valuation of digital art content. It raised ₹5.5 crore through seed funding and plans to go public in 2022. The company also provides B2B solutions for NFT marketplaces and B2C for end customers to understand the trends of particular NFT collections.

Digital Content Creators

Yashraj Mukhate, 26

Singer, songwriter, composer

The pandemic turned out to be a golden time for Yashraj Mukhate who rose to fame by recreating existing videos and adding a musical twist to them. His content went viral, and his following shot up from a few hundreds to 2.2M+ followers on Instagram and 4.8M+ on YouTube in one year. The singer, songwriter and music composer who started his journey by creating background music for TV soaps is all set to release original songs.

Ecommerce & Retail

Co-founders, Sanfe

Founded in 2018, Sanfe has raised $1.5 million and claims to have a revenue of ₹40 crore. It aims to create a new category in India focussed on female hygiene and intimate care products. The startup, says Anjali Sosale, partner at Westbridge Ventures, is seeking to break taboos and market its products to young audiences.

Enterprise Technology

Amit Singh, 28

Co-founder, WeekDay

A problem that Singh faced in his previous startup triggered the idea of WeekDay, which offers a Chrome browser extension for engineers to recommend friends for jobs at Y Combinator portfolio firms, and get paid. Singh co-founded WeekDay about 14 months ago, with Chetan Dalal, 28 (CPO), Anubhav Malik, 24 (CTO), and Hari Shankar, 28 (COO). They made it to Y Combinator in 2021; it is VC-funded and profitable, says Singh.

Industry, Manufacturing & Energy

Advait Kumar, 29

Co-founder, Swajal

Advait Kumar and his mother, Vibha Tripathi, a former professor at IIT-Kanpur, founded Swajal, a Gurugram-based startup that uses solar energy to power a proprietary water kiosk system called WaterATM in 2014. The company has over 500 WaterATM installations across India, and has raised over $2.8 million.

Music

Ranjani Ramadoss, 23

& Chlipher Christopher, 22 (Ranj & Clifr)

Ramadoss and Christopher started learning music when they were four and six, respectively. They knew from the start that they wanted to pursue music as a full-time career. The music they make is mostly the music they like to listen to. The duo feels they are in the early days of their careers. “Our music always reflects what we are feeling. We try to push ourselves out of our comfort zone and that reflects in our sound. We like to sound unique, and not different,” they say.  

NGOs & Social Entrepreneurship

Community development director, Hemkunt Foundation

The Gurugram-based non-profit has 12 ongoing projects, ranging from 24x7 oxygen supply and Covid19 relief to menstrual hygiene and tree plantation. It played a crucial role in providing medical support during the second Covid wave. Today, led by Ahluwalia, the Hemkunt Foundation has impacted over 22 lakh people across 12 states. They also have 21 mobile medical units across Punjab, Haryana and Uttarakhand.

Sport

Bhavani Devi, 28

Fencer

The first Indian fencer to compete at the Olympics and also win a match, Bhavani Devi has brought visibility to a relatively obscure sport in the country. She followed it up by winning an individual women’s sabre event in France. Bhavani will now need to carry the momentum into 2022, and climb up the world rankings from her current 59.