Forbes India 30 Under 30: The ones to watch out for

Co-founder, WeVOIS Labs Private Limited

Founded in 2018, WeVOIS Labs is a waste management startup building technology tools for sanitation workers. “Inefficient and unreliable collection of waste leads to more than 70 percent of it not being properly processed,”says Vashistha. They have developed a navigation application for drivers, real-time surveillance of vehicles, and AI-based scheduling. They charge a monthly fee for every household from the government and other businesses for their technology and services. Their solution has increased waste collection efficiency from 40 percent to 95 percent.

Aditya Bhargava

Consumer Tech

Co-founder and COO, The Little Farm

Gurugram-based The Little Farm handcrafts farm fresh pickles, superfoods, spices and more. Siblings Aditya and Niharika Bhargava pumped in up to ₹20 lakh from their savings to start the venture. The startup had raised funding from angels and 100x VC. 

Kamya Khurana(right), Nimisha Saraf(centre) and Sonaali Bhatla, Co-founders, Nori Narrative

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Design

Co-founders, Nori Narrative

Delhi-based Nori Narrative is an all-women-led design practice working at the convergence of architecture with other creative disciplines like  art, technology, narratives and experiences. Their dedication to breaking conventions earned them recognition from DesignXDesign & Alliance Française and they were chosen among the top 20 emerging design practitioners in India under the age of 35 in 2023.

Pramod Priya Ranjan

Pramod Priya Ranjan | 26

Co-founder and director, Care Form Labs Private Limited (Onpery®)

An industrial and system design graduate from IIT-Delhi, with experience in innovation, strategy, venture building and social impact projects, Ranjan, along with Nachiket Kiran Thakur, co-founded Onpery®, a wellness brand, offering proprietary reusable menstrual products, including menstrual cups, reusable sanitary pads, and a proprietary wellness literacy novel series on all types of discharges, children’s safety and empathy management.

Saloni Kukreja

Digital Content Creators

Chef, content creator, and entrepreneur

For the last eight years, chef,  entrepreneur and content creator Saloni Kukreja has been working in the culinary field, writing about food and creating content and recipes across cuisines. Her curiosity for food and flavour pushed her to pursue a Diploma in Culinary Arts and Pastry from the Northwest Culinary Academy in Vancouver, Canada. In her culinary journey, Kukreja has worked with brands such as Godrej, Nestlé, Swiggy, Zomato, Coca-Cola, L’Oreal, Maybelline, Cadbury and more. In early 2023, she launched Indu Ice Cream, a unique palette of ice creams and sorbets made with local ingredients as a homage to Indian roots and flavours. She also appeared on MasterChef India Season 7 as a guest judge for a special episode and has appeared on Fox with chef Gary Mehigan for a cooking show.

Vanshika Kaji

Ecommerce & Retail

Co-founder, Knya

Kaji is a fourth-generation textiles entrepreneur, while Knya makes performance apparel such as functional scrubs and aprons for medical professionals. It sells through its website, app, physical stores, direct to hospitals and online marketplaces. Knya claims to have sold to over 2 lakh medical professionals and over 1,000+ institutes.

Dilip Ramesh(left), CTO & co-founder, Thinkerbell Labs, Aman Srivastava (right), CBO & co-founder, Thinkerbell Labs and Saif Shaikh (centre), CPO & co-founder, Thinkerbell Labs

Education

CPO & co-founder, Thinkerbell Labs

Including CEO Sanskriti Dawle (32), all the co-founders are graduates from BITS Pilani, Goa, and started working on this product while in college, and later developed it into ‘Annie’, a multi-modal learning method (using audio and braille) for the visually impaired. “For all of us, working on something that has tangible social impact has been a key factor, and we also wanted it to be a good technical challenge,” says Dilip Ramesh, co-founder and CTO of Thinkerbell Labs, established in 2016. It has raised three rounds of funding, totalling a little less than $1 million dollars. It operates in India, US, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. In India, Annie has been deployed at 130 centres with 50-plus customers, which includes government departments and schools, NGOs, schools and individual donors. It plans to enhance its manufacturing capabilities, and increase product capacities to reach a larger audience.

Yash Jain

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Enterprise Technology

Founder NimbusPost

An entrepreneur since 18, he founded NimbusPost in 2019. The company attempts to bridge the gap between ecommerce sellers and courier partners, offering more than 27 national and international courier partners on a single platform. Sellers can ship to some 29,000 pin codes in India and 196 countries, according to Jain.

Nikhita Raghunath

Nikhita Raghunath | 27

Software engineer, VMWare

Asoftware engineer, she is a rising star in the world of open-source software, and in particular with respect Kubernetes. She’s also credited with building a strong community of opensource engineers in India. She was named to an 11-member technical oversight committee of the influential Cloud Native Computing Foundation and chaired a global conference, KubeCon, last year.

Babil Khan

Entertainment

Actor

He made a well-received debut in 2022 with Anvita Dutt’s Qala, and in 2023, was appreciated for his performance in The Railway Men. He also appeared in the high school comedy Friday Night Plan. His next project is alongside Amitabh Bachchan in Pooja Kaul’s The Umesh Chronicles. Babil, who is the son of late actor Irrfan Khan and actor-writer Sutapa Sikdar, has shown promise with his projects so far, and has an interesting lineup of work ahead.

Aarushi Kilawat

Fashion

Founder & creative head, The Loom Art

The founder and creative director of the Jaipur-based homegrown label The Loom Art is dedicated to reviving the ancient crafts of handloom weaving techniques and embroidery in a fast fashion dominated world. In addition, she is providing a platform to the artisans to come together and co-create. In 2022, Aarushi Kilawat added TLA Jewels as an extension to her product range. Recently, her Indian wear brand TARO was one of the finalists at the Elle Graduate Awards in the Indian Wear Category.

Sumedha Singha

Food And Hospitality

Senior associate, BanyanTree Finance

Singhal works at private equity fund BanyanTree Finance, and was asked to lead operations for an investee company Nirula’s. In 2021, Singhal pivoted it from a legacy icecream brand to a multi-cuisine food chain with standardisation across outlets. She reworked recipes to include 100 percent meat in their patties, and pure dairy ice creams without palm oil. From a Delhi-NCR-only brand with 74 outlets, Nirula’s is now a multi-city brand with 175-plus outlets.

In 2022, she also led a strategy to align Nirula’s with Gen Z by developing a healthy menu and launched the menu under Café Healthy High, a sister brand, which now adds ₹1 crore to the top line.

Aayush Anand

Health Care

Co-founder, Level Supermind

His app helps improve the brain’s performance through what the company says are curated neuro-science-backed meditations, workouts, journals, and stories. Level Supermind has managed over 800,000 downloads and was awarded Google Play Best of 2023.

Lisa Mishra

Music

Singer/songwriter

Lisa Mishra is an Indian-American singer who rose to fame with her rendition of the hit Bollywood song ‘Tareefan’. Mishra’s passion for music is representative in her voice which captivates the audience and leaves them wanting for more. She has made a name for herself in the Bollywood music industry with her songs in films such as The Sky is Pink and Good Newwz, among others. Mishra has over 18 lakh monthly listeners on Spotify.

Esha Singh

Sports

Shooter

At 19, Esha Singh is India’s latest shooting sensation, winning four medals—one gold and three silvers—at the Asian Games. It’s the highest medals tally for a woman Indian shooter at the Games. Recently, she earned herself a spot at the Paris Olympic Games by winning another gold at the Asian Olympic qualifier in Jakarta.