Meet women entrepreneurs in their 20s running kickass startups

With the booming startup ecosystem in India, every day, more and more young women are turning to entrepreneurship to fill the gap they witness in society. 

A survey by Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) and Youth Co:Lab in 2019 suggested that youth entrepreneurs in India innovate is the highest in Asia and the Pacific region. 

According to the survey, around 55 percent of the Total Early-stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) showed innovation-orientation for entering new markets or introducing new products, services, or processes that are unique to the market.

This is exactly what these entrepreneurs are up to.

Shubhi Jain, Maatiwala

Beyond being a traffic warden in Indore, 24-year-old Shubhi Jain founded her startup Maatiwala – a one-stop-shop for all gardening requirements at homes where one can book a gardener online – in January 2021. 

“I have always felt a deeper connection with plants and nature and so I wanted to do something in this space. I’ve set it up in Indore and it’s doing well so far. One can get all the gardening services and products from our website,” says Shubhi.

She currently has five gardeners in her team, whom she has called from her hometown in Bina, Sagar district, Madhya Pradesh. “I feel happy that they are now living in the city along with their family and this work has helped them raise their standard of living.” 

She is a traffic warden in the evening, an entrepreneur during the day, but Shubhi’s mornings begin as a radio jockey with Radio Mirchi. 

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Ria and Shreya, CAVA Athleisure

Bengaluru-based sister duo Ria (22) and Shreya Mittal (19) gauged a rise in demand of athleisure clothing early on in the COVID-19 imposed lockdown when they were back home and attending online classes and decided to launch an online athleisure brand CAVA in 2020.

While Ria studied BSc in fashion management from the University of the Arts, London, Shreya is in her first-year undergrad at Warwick University, UK.

“We also noticed that our friends and many other young millennials who were experimenting with street style athleisure wear could not find good labels to shop from. We really thought it was the right time to enter this space,” Ria told HerStory.

CAVA is completely bootstrapped, started with a capital of Rs 40 lakh. 

Ria claims that her athleisure wear is made of sustainable, premium fabrics and she operates from state-of-the-art production facilities. 

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Prachi Shevgaonkar, Cool The Globe 

Pune-based Prachi Shevgaonkar was in her first semester at college when she got the idea to create an app that could measure one’s greenhouse gas emissions. Three years later, Cool The Globe has over 24,000 users across the world.

The 23-year-old was studying mass communication at Symbiosis International University, Pune, when in her first semester of college she Googled, “What is the biggest problem in the world today?” Climate change popped up. 

“I started reading more about climate change, the role I was playing in it. I learned that we only have three decades to avoid the worst effects of climate change. It troubled me. I wanted to do something about it, at least at my own level. My family and I took a simple pledge to reduce our own greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent every year,” she tells HerStory.

Cool The Globe is a free, citizen-led app for climate action that helps individuals reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a target. The app gives a monthly and annual target to users to reduce their GHG Emissions. Users can make savings across 100+ customisable climate actions embedded into their day-to-day life. They can also see the emissions they avoided with each action.

Prachi was recently awarded the Olive Crown Award by the International Advertising Association and named the young Green Crusader of the year.

She recently became the first Indian to be appointed on the advisory board of the climate leadership coalition, along with the former prime minister of Finland and global leaders. 

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Anuva Kakkar, Tiggle

Anuva Kakkar started an affordable hot chocolate brand Tiggle when she was only 21 — just before the coronavirus-imposed lockdown. She started by selling the beverage-to-go outside a metro station and now claims to have delivered 200,000 cups to 20,000+ pin codes.

“I am a hot chocolate lover, and late one night, when I was craving hot chocolate, I realised the only place one could find a good cuppa were cafes. A fresher back then, I could only afford to go to a café a few times a month,” she recalls. 

These thoughts led to the inception of Tiggle, albeit at an extremely small scale. The founder started by purchasing a five-litre steel jar, three litres of milk, and “everything else needed to prepare my hot chocolate”. 

She set up shop outside a metro station in Gurgaon, in a bid to sell and gauge market interest in her product. 

Within a year of operation, she claims that Tiggle has been able to scale to more than 14,000 customers and deliver 2,00,000 cups of hot chocolate to 20,000+ pincodes.