New york: Over 30 Indian-origin innovators, entrepreneurs and leaders have been featured in the 2017 edition of Forbes’ list of super achievers under the age of 30 who seek to break the status quo and transform the world. The Forbes list has 30 game changers in 20 industries including healthcare, manufacturing, sports and finance.
The 600 in the list are “challenging the conventional wisdom and rewriting the rules for the next generation of entrepreneurs, entertainers, educators and more. They are passionate and formidable bunch, and for good reason. Their goal is nothing short of breaking the status quo and transforming the world.”
The group has over 30 men and women who are of Indian-origin and are making a mark in their fields. The list includes 27-year-old Vivek Kopparthi, cofounder of NeoLight that has developed a phototherapy device that is portable for use at home for jaundice.
The company is also working on a second tool to treat infant hypothermia. Prarthna Desai, 27, left her Harvard graduate school programme to use drones to get medication to people in the developing world.
In her operations role at the healthcare company Zipline, she is leading efforts to integrate the medicine-delivery-by-drone service with the healthcare system in Rwanda. Shaun Patel, 28, is the orthopedic surgery chief resident at Harvard Medical School and has dozens of scientific publications in surgery journals.
His company, OrthoNinja, aims to streamline communication between doctors by creating a mobile app that allows doctors to consult with one another. Rohan Suri, 17 is the founder of Averia Health Solutions and has developed an improved concussion test.
In the law and policy category is 27 year old Varun Sivaram, Acting Director: Energy Security and Climate Change in leading think tank Council on Foreign Relations. Sivaram completed his PhD at Oxford University and is on the advisory boards for Stanford’s energy and environment institutes.
He is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University teaching “clean energy innovation” and previously, he advised Hillary Clinton’s campaign on energy policy. In manufacturing and industry, Neha Gupta, 28, played a role in the sale of Beats by Dre to Apple.
She manages manufacturing and supply chain for DAQRI, which makes augmented reality headsets to improve safety and efficiency for industrial workers. Featured in the social entrepreneurs category is Aditya Agarwalla, 23, Cofounder of Kisan Network, The Princeton University dropout co-founded the Kisan Network, which is an online marketplace for small-scale farmers in India.
In the sports category is Akshay Khanna, 29, Vice President of Strategy for American football team Philadelphia 76ers. Among the top guns in the venture capital sector is Anarghya Vardhana, 28, who joined the firm Maveron after spending a year at Rothenberg Ventures, where she launched a virtual reality accelerator and sourced and made seed investments in a dozen startups in the virtual reality space.
Akshay Goyal, 28, is the Vice President of Starwood Capital. The youngest vice president in Starwood’s history when he was promoted at the age 26, Goyal focuses on hotel acquisitions and has helped drive over USD 7 billion in deals.
Recently he helped sell a portfolio of 240 US hotels to China Life for USD 2 billion. In the consumer technology sector is Ajay Yadav, 29, who is the founder of Roomi, a startup app that lets users find the right roommate to live with, chat with each other, search for listings, apply for an apartment and pay rent.
New York-based Roomi has raised USD 7 million to date.
PTI