Isha Ambani Piramal, Akash Ambani in Fortune 40-under-40 Technology List
Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani is the most successful businessman in the country. With a net worth of $80.5 billion, Ambani is currently the 8th richest person in the world and the only Indian in the top 10. Ambani's children are slowly establishing themselves as well with Reliance Jio. Ambani's elder son Akash Ambani and daughter Isha Ambani Piramal have been placed in the Fortune global 40-under-40 technology list 2020.
the world's seventh-richest man, Mukesh Ambani's twin children Isha and Akash, and ed-tech startup Byju's founder Byju Raveendran are among the Indians who have debuted on Fortune's '40 Under 40' list of influential people around the globe.
It is no secret that Reliance Industries, India’s largest company is a 47-year-old conglomerate which has amassed a fortune in petrochemicals before dominating India’s mobile connectivity market with low-cost wireless carrier Jio which it debuted in 2016. Akash and Isha Ambani are the twin children of Mukesh Ambani Reliance is a family business.
While Akash joined the company in 2014 after receiving an economics degree from Brown University, Isha joined a year later, following stints at Yale, Stanford, and McKinsey. Talking about the Ambani twins, Fortune said, "As Jio board members, they helped seal the company’s recent megadeal with Facebook—$5.7 billion for a 9.99% stake—plus major follow-on investments from marquee tech titans like Google, Qualcomm, and Intel. The flurry of investments lent the business an eye-popping $65 billion private valuation."
"The Ambani scions lead enviable lives: attending private concerts featuring Beyoncé, partying with buddies Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas, living it up in a 27-story residential skyscraping pleasure palace in Mumbai," it added.
Fortune further mentioned how the Akash and Isha are training—along with their younger brother, Anant, 25, who is a more recent addition to Jio’s board—to take on their father’s empire. Reliance is now entering retail and a major proving ground will be e-commerce. Recently, both Akash and Isha helped launch Jio Mart, a venture that aims to challenge Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart for command of India’s massive and fast-growing online shopping market.
Aside from the Ambanis, another Indian who made the 40-under-40 technology is list is Byju's founder Byju Raveendran. Talking about the young billionaire, Fortune wrote, "Byju Raveendran has shown the world that it really is possible to build a massively successful online education company." Byju’s has become India’s biggest education technology company. Since its founding in 2011, the startup has raised over $1 billion and is now worth more than $10 billion.
Raveendran is now looking to expand Byju’s into new countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. Though the education business tends to slow down in the summer, Raveendran has been keeping busy amid Covid-19 as well. In August, Byju’s bought the education technology startup WhiteHat Jr. for $300 million.
Though the education business tends to slow down in the summer, Raveendran has been keeping busy. In August, Byju's bought the education technology startup WhiteHat Jr for USD 300 million.
Manu Kumar Jain, managing director of Xiaomi India, also features on the list. "Jain knew nothing about smartphones when Chinese giant Xiaomi tapped him in 2014 to build its India operations from the ground up. But he did know a thing or two about startups," Fortune said.
The last company he founded, Jabong, was a fashion e-commerce player that was sold to Flipkart. In his quest for knowledge at the start of his new gig, the executive regularly carried between 30 to 40 smartphones in his bag, testing out features and checking out competitors.
"His (literal) heavy lifting paid off: Under Jain, Xiaomi overtook Korean colossus Samsung to become the smartphone leader in India in just three years, bolstered by a strategy to act more like an Indian company," it added.
