Neerja Sethi, Net Worth: $1 billion
Neerja Sethi is the next businesswoman on the list. In 1980, she and her husband, Bharat Desai, co-founded the IT consultancy and outsourcing company Syntel. They initially started the company in their little apartment in Troy, Michigan, which eventually grew into an international success story. However, Syntel was purchased by Atos SE, a French IT company, for $3.4 billion in 2018. For her share, Sethi received nearly $510 million.
Sethi has been with Syntel since 1980 as an executive. However, she did not join Atos after the takeover. Sethi and her spouse met at work while working for the IT business Tata Consulting Services. They collaborated to design a similar model. They started their business with a $2,000 personal investment.
Neha Narkhede, Net worth: $600 million
The third business woman on the list is Neha Narkhede, who is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Confluent, a $4.5 billion streaming data technology firm. She co-founded the Palo Alto-based firm in 2014. Narkhede initially worked in Oracle as a principal software engineer. She later went to work for LinkedIn as the head of streams infrastructure. The Platform Apache Kafka was developed by Narkhede and her colleagues Jun Rao and Jay Kreps in 2011.
She also co-authored the book “Kafka: The Definitive Guide”. In 2019, she and her team earned $125 million, making the company’s total value to $206 million, and in April, the company again raised $250 million and the total value was $456 million. Narkhede was born in Pune and graduated from University of Pune with BSc degree in engineering, and obtained her MSc in technology from Georgia Tech.
