Pune's Self-Made Entrepreneur Neha Narkhede Makes It To India's Rich List With Net Worth Of Rs 13,380 Crore (2024)

IIFL Wealth released HURUN INDIA RICH LIST 2022, the 11th annual ranking of the richest individuals in India.

Pune: Indian-American Neha Narkhede, co-Founder of Confluent, a streaming data technology company, figured in the India’s rich list 2022.According to IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List, the 37-year-old Narkhede is the youngest self-made woman entrepreneur to be in India’s rich list. Interestingly, this year’s list showed “a record 735 entrepreneurs or 67% are self-made, up from 659 last year, and up from 367(54%) five years ago. 79% (117) of new faces this year are self-made.”

According to the Hurun rich list, “1,103 individuals are a part of this list, up by 96 from last year, across 122 cities. Cumulative wealth has increased by 9.4%, while average wealth decreased by 1%.”

Neha Narkhede had reportedly bagged the 8th position among the top 10 richest Indian women. The 37-year-old is the recent entry to join India’s wealthiest women with a net worth of ₹13,380 crore.

India’s youngest self-made woman entrepreneur was raised in Pune, Maharashtra and went to the University of Pune where she got her Bachelor of Science in Engineering from SCTR’S Pune Institute of Computer Technology(PICT) college. She left India in 2006 to get her master’s in computer science at Georgia Tech and after graduating in 2007, she began her career at Oracle and then at LinkedIn, where she reportedly worked as a software engineer.

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In an interview to Forbes, she had said that she migrated to US to have a career in technology. The youngest woman entrepreneur boasts of a illustrious career, as before launching Confluent, Neha Narkhede had worked with LinkedIn where she had contributed to developing an open source messaging system named Apache Kafka which was designed to handle the networking site’s large data input.

According to Forbes report released last month in August, “eight years ago, she and her team decided to bring that technology to other businesses encountering the same problems with user data and founded Confluent, a data-streaming platform that IPOd last June.”

Narkhede, after her education, joined Oracle and then LinkedIn where set up open source platform Apache Kafka.In 2014, the she and her colleagues Jun Rao and Jay Kreps decided to start Confluent with Narkhede as the Chief Technology Officer and later as the Chief Product Officer. She is now on the company’s board. The company went public in 2021 at $9.1 billion valuation, as per Forbes. In June 2021, Confluent had risen to 25 per cent on the NASDAQ, reaching a market valuation of US $11.4 billion.