In a conversation with Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory, Amitabh Chaudhry, CEO of Axis Bank, talks about leadership during COVID-19, business disruption, and how businesses can survive this pandemic. Read more at: https://yourstory.com/video/shradha-sharma-amitabh-chaudhry/amp Follow us on Social Media: Facebook: www.facebook.com/yourst…

In a world where people are constantly trying to change you, it takes courage to remain true to who you are. Nothing summarises Vidya Balan's journey as an actor than this E E Cummings quote. Listen to her fantastic story as she talks to YourStory's Shradha Sharma in this conversation that will leave you inspired. Read more at: https://yourstory.co…

Bejul Somaia, Managing Director, Lightspeed Venture Partners, is known for making bold bets, investing early, and devoting his time to nurturing and coaching his entrepreneurs. In a conversation with YourStory Founder Shradha Sharma, Bejul talks investment strategies, founder-investor-fit, and more. Read more at: https://yourstory.com/2020/09/light…

Indore-based Kimirica Hunter now manufactures hotel toiletries and amenities for a range of premium hotels such as Marriott, Starwood, Hilton, Jumeirah, Hyatt, Sofitel, Pullman, and an array of independent luxury hotels. Read more at: https://yourstory.com/smbstory/hotel-travel-kimirica-hunter-marriott Follow us on Social Media: Facebook: www.faceb…

Two-time Silver medalist, para-athlete Divij Shah lives by the maxim that fear is the greatest disability of all. 'Daar ke aage jeet hai' Some injuries heal faster if you move forward. This is not just a simple motivational line, but a powerful statement that Divij Shah lives by. Read more at: https://yourstory.com/2018/03/divij-shah-silver-medal-p…

A spinal injury may have confined her to a wheelchair, but Nisha Gupta didn't let that stop her. Now an international basketball player, she dreams of being a model when not on the basketball court. Read more at: https://yourstory.com/2021/02/monday-motivation-wheelchair-basketball-woman-nisha-gupta Follow us on Social Media: Facebook: www.facebook…

On this episode of YS Exclusive: Leadership Talk, Vinita Bali, Independent Director and Former MD of Britannia Industries talks about why empathy is an important element of leadership, how focusing on the customer and their needs should be at the forefront to build a great business and much more. Read more at: https://yourstory.com/video/leadership…

In 2019, the Sarin brothers — Shaan, Rahul, and Aakash — took up a three-storey building in Punjabi Bagh, Delhi, and launched three restaurants — one on each floor. The three restaurants, which share a kitchen, are named TEO Lounge and Bar, The Dineroom, and Cartoony Planet. Read more at: https://yourstory.com/smbstory/delhi-restaurant-dineroom-teo…

Logistics startup Rivigo changed the way trucks ply across India with its relay model. The company, India’s latest unicorn, now has 3,000 customers across 20 sectors, and aims to expand its footprint. Rivigo was set up in 2014 by former Mckinsey consultants Deepak Garg (37) and Gazal (33) with the idea of creating a relay truck model, where no driv…

Wasif Mohd started Fresh Up Mattresses in 2016 to differentiate from the competition and capture the unorganised sector. In four years, Fresh Up has emerged as a fast-growing mattress brand in North India with over 250 employees. Read more at: https://yourstory.com/smbstory/mattress-brand-fresh-up-noida Follow us on Social Media: Facebook: www.face…

Justin Waldron co-founded gaming company Zynga with Mark Pincus when he was 19. Today, he is an investor in over 50 companies across the globe, and has also founded another gaming startup - Playco. Justin talks about his Zynga journey, investing in startups, and founding Playco. Read more at: https://yourstory.com/2021/03/zynga-startup-investor-ser…

Michelin star chef, restaurateur, cookbook writer, filmmaker, and humanitarian Vikas Khanna talks to Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory, about his FeedIndia Mission, mental health, and much more. Read more at: https://yourstory.com/video/vikash-khanna-feedindia/amp Follow us on Social Media: Facebook: www.facebook.com/yourstorycom Instagr…

Boxer Manju Rani shares how she broke the glass ceiling in a Haryana village, and overcame economic hardships to become successful. This is a story of grit, determination, and how belief can take you to great heights. Read more at: https://yourstory.com/socialstory/2020/04/manju-rani-young-boxer-india Follow us on Social Media: Facebook: www.facebo…

Laminar is a platform as a service that lets a content company or a creator launch a global streaming service, by providing end-to-end solutions. Raheel Khursheed was Snapchat’s first employee in India, hired to lead the Santa Monica-based disappearing messaging application’s operations in the country. But six months into the gig, bitten by the ent…

Founded in 2015, Ultraviolette is a Bengaluru-based electric vehicle company, which is building an ‘aspirational’ superbike for the Indian market. In India, entrepreneurs Narayan Subramaniam and Niraj Rajamohan realised that the next decade would see a rising need for electric vehicles. However, they wanted to find a niche in this sector, and make …

With no revenue to rent an office, Piyush Somani started a small web hosting support business in a kindergarten centre in Nashik, where his team worked after the kids had left. Read more at: https://yourstory.com/smbstory/entrepreneur-kindergarten-centre-inspiration-esds-software-company Follow us on Social Media: Facebook: www.facebook.com/yoursto…

In this story, we feature Lalitesh Katragadda, the man who built Google Map Maker and Google Maps for India. Currently, as the founder of Indihood, the serial entrepreneur is building tech to create impact at scale. Read more at: https://yourstory.com/2020/03/techie-tuesday-lalitesh-katragadda-google-maps-india Follow us on Social Media: Facebook: …

How Twitter plans to fight abuse and hate on its platform. According to Twitter India Managing Director (MD), Manish Maheswari, the company has been proactively taking action against abusive behaviour in a ‘predictive way’ rather than just a ‘reactive way’. Manish tells YourStory Founder and CEO Shradha Sharma that in this endeavour, the company ha…

[Product roadmap] The role tech played in the journey of Bharat-focused social media startup ShareChat. In this week’s Product Roadmap we feature ShareChat, one of India’s newest unicorns. Here’s the story of how technology helped the Bharat-focused social media content platform build a 280-million user community along with video platform Moj. Read…

Popular YouTuber and content creator Saloni Srivastava started HustlePost Academy to cater to a growing number of people who wanted to use social media platforms to start a business. The Academy offers 13 courses with live interactive sessions. Three years after Saloni Srivastava became a successful YouTuber with an interesting blend of tips and tr…

Haris Ali, a Bengaluru-based animal rescuer and entrepreneur, started Sarvoham Welfare Trust to rescue and rehabilitate injured dogs from across the city. As a 12-year-old, Haris Ali loved taking care of a little family of dogs near his home – a mother with a litter of three puppies. With his daily pocket money of Rs 2, Haris would buy a small pack…

Growing up in Dehradun, Eltropy Co-founder, Ashish Garg, dreamt of going to the US, working with computers and having his own startup; all of which he realised. This is his story. he tells YourStory over a Zoom call, from his residence on a hilltop in San Jose, California, where he has his own tech startup called Eltropy today. Read more at: https:…

One of Google’s early employees, Mohit was a part of the team that built the Google File System, which the tech giant still relies on for storing data and access. He is also referred to as the Father of Hyperconvergence, the main technology of his product at his first startup, Nutanix, a listed cloud computing company with a valuation of over $5 bi…

Apollo Hospitals Founder Chairman Prathap C Reddy went on to revolutionise India’s healthcare. He is often referred to as the architect of modern healthcare in India. The year was 1983. India was in the pre-liberalisation era, and the economy was shrouded in bureaucratic red-tapism. ‘Licence Raj’ was the order of the day. It involved an elaborate s…

Khushboo Jain, Co-founder of ImpactGuru, says, the crowdfunding platform continues to change the lives of people through timely healthcare assistance. “Every minute, 100 people get hospitalised in India and 30 health insurance claims are filed. Seven out of 10 from the middle class population in India do not have any health insurance and those who …

Diksha Pande and Amit Nanwani started snacks startup Samosa Party in 2017 to make quality samosas accessible to customers across all channels. It has sold 22 lakh samosas till now. The Indian snack market is pegged at Rs 42 lakh crore, and 65 percent of this is completely unorganised. With Indians consuming 2.7 times snacks compared to 2.3 times me…

IndiaMart, which was set up at the height of the dot com boom and went on to survive the bust, launched its Initial Public Offer (IPO) on June 24, 2019, with a price band of Rs 970-973 to raise over Rs 474 crore. In this exclusive, in-depth story read how Dinesh Agarwal, Founder & CEO of IndiaMart InterMesh, founded this B2B ecommerce company in th…

Social Story brings you the story of Project Balika. Launched by Jasmine Bala, Project Balika focuses on girls’ education and also conducts several community initiatives around menstrual hygiene, nutrition, and gender sensitisation. Read more at: https://yourstory.com/socialstory/2021/03/project-balika-girls-stay-in-school-menstrual-hygeine-covid-1…

Rajani Etimarpu belongs to a small village Enumulavaripalli in Anantapur district, Andhra Pradesh. Despite being unable to afford proper equipment, her grit and determination led her to play for the national team. Not many would have heard of Enumulavaripalli village. It is a small hamlet in the Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh. However, many h…

The COVID-19 pandemic has been tough on everyone. While several sectors have been hit badly, some have been more affected than others, travel being one such industry. India’s largest online travel booking company, MakeMyTrip, understandably found itself severely hit amid the coronavirus crisis, as its revenues plummeted from $500 million a month ru…

From Wuhan to Germany, this Bengaluru startup has found a way to teleport human expertise during coronavirus. In February this year when the rest of the world was still blissfully ignoring the harm that the novel coronavirus was silently but surely unleashing, a young startup from Bengaluru was on a mission impossible in Wuhan in China. Read more a…

How much will you pay for love on online dating apps? Tinder, which has 5.7 million paid subscribers globally, utilises a dynamic pricing structure that offers multiple price points that may vary by region, length of subscription, recent in-app promotions, and more. Bumble, which made its high-profile entry in India in 2018 riding on Bollywood cele…

Aditi Pany is the Founder and CEO of Qalara, a Bengaluru-based startup that offers a wholesale ecommerce marketplace for small businesses to export across the world. The startup is backed by the Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL). Read more at: https://yourstory.com/2020/12/mukesh-ambani-reliance-industries-startup-qalara-aditi-pany Fo…

Subhag HealthTech that was set to take off in India this year with its low-cost, home-based infertility treatment solution, temporarily shifted gears and started manufacturing copper face masks. Read more at: https://yourstory.com/2020/10/vconceive-subhag-healthtech-startup-iui-infertility-treatment-copper-mask-covid19 Follow us on Social Media: Fa…

Flipkart is attracting many young and upcoming brands, now backing new entrepreneurs by offering seller support services, training in fulfilment, and more. As of date, Flipkart has more than one million small sellers registered on its platform. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift towards a digital world and triggered lasting changes in onli…

In an exclusive interaction with YourStory Founder & CEO Shradha Sharma, Amazon India Head Amit Agarwal talks at length about the ecommerce giant's India journey and long-term commitment to the market. In just six years since Amazon set up shop in India, the global ecommerce giant has transformed the way Indians buy and sell. With nearly half a mil…

ChaiPoint's SaaS-based end-to-end operating system handles billing, warehouse management, inventory, and vendor management, and frees up the entrepreneur to focus on the product. Tea café chain Chai Point brewed its success story by focusing on retail outlets and IOT-based vending machines, primarily in tech parks. Launched in 2010, the company cla…

As the global fashion scene changes due to coronavirus, Bengaluru-based AI startup Bigthinx is making all the right noises, and finds itself at the heart of the revolution. Helping Fashinnovation — which counts marquee brands such as Louis Vuitton and Fast Company as part of its community — put together this virtual fashion show is Bengaluru-based …

Started by Shauravi Malik, Meghana Narayan, and Umang Bhattacharyya, Slurrp Farm offers healthy and preservative-free snack options for children made from traditional grains. The brand has seen 3x growth during the pandemic. The two friends started Slurrp Farm in October 2016 when they realised most supermarket shelves only stocked products made wi…

Mirchi.com is the brainchild of Hyderabad-based Poornima Mital who launched an ecommerce marketplace for Indian sweets and snacks like homemade pickles, snack bars, laddoos, chocolates, podis, bhujia, ghatiya, kachoris, nimkis, etc. Four years later, there are close to 5,000 sellers listed on the platform whose products are shipped across India and…

Building a brighter future: For 30 years, Sabina Solomon has been caring for orphans in Bengaluru. Sabina Solomon and her family have been looking after the children at Angels Orphanage for over 30 years. But the pandemic has made meeting even their basic needs a challenge Read more at: https://yourstory.com/socialstory/2021/01/orphans-bangalore-co…

Does it make sense to bring in an outsider at the top so late in a company’s life cycle? Is it a ploy to attract top talent or something more than that? Here’s a look at the blockbuster jodi at Dailyhunt. With the marriage metaphor often used in the startup world to explain the inexplicable, it was akin to saying, ‘who gets married at 60’. Not to s…

Leadership Talks | Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw says Biocon’s ALZUMAb drug will put India on the global map. Biocon Founder Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw urges innovators to make more Made in India COVID-19 drugs and says she is proud of the biotech firm's ALZUMAb drug, which is helping save the lives of coronavirus patients. Read more at: https://yourstory.com/video…

The founder of celebrity, fashion, film and wedding styling startup, Wardrobist, Aastha Sharma was set to become a lawyer, but fate had other plans. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Saif Ali Khan and Disha Patani are just some of the names from Aastha Sharma’s long list of celebrity clients. Founder of celebrity, fashion, film and wedding styling startup, W…

For over 40 years, Holocaust survivor Eva Erben has refused to tell her story. But today, with the rise of antisemitism and Holocaust denial, she shares her story to help the fight against antisemitism and for human rights. YourStory Founder and CEO Shradha Sharma recently caught up with the 89-year-old holocaust survivor on YourStory Inspirations …

When Rajiv Bansal came back to India after twenty years in Silicon Valley to lead the transformation at HT Media, India's second-largest media company, as its digital CEO, he needed a partner to lead content operations and form a shared vision about the future. So, he reached out to journalist and digital newsroom veteran Nilanjana Bhaduri Jha, who…

Byju’s Founder and CEO Byju Raveendran grew up in the coastal village of Azhikode where he studied in a Malayalam-medium government school. “I do business for fun... been very fortunate enough [sic] to have my passion intersect with the real need, and obviously, I had the guts to pursue it, and I’ll pursue it till I get it and there is nothing like…

In an exclusive interaction with Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory, Nirmala Sitharaman, Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs of India, talks about the government’s measures to revive and promote MSMEs and startups. Read more at: https://yourstory.com/2020/05/exclusive-finance-minister-nirmala-sitharaman-startups-msmes-policies Follo…

N. Ranga Rao started Cycle Pure Agarbathies in 1948. What started at home to make ends meet, now has a presence in 75 countries selling Rs 1,000 crore worth agarbathies a year. NR group has been conferred with Par Excellence Awards (2009 and 2010) at the National Convention on Quality Concepts. The group has also received nine Chemexcil awards, six…

Rashesh Shah never wanted to become an entrepreneur. Born in a Gujarati business family, he was the first to study in an English-medium school. In fact, he pursued an MBA (Master of Business Administration) specifically so that he would not have to follow in his father and uncles’ footsteps and get into business. Read more at: https://yourstory.com…