Nooyi Among US’ Richest Self-Made Women Of Indian Origin

Four Indian-origin women have been named by Forbes among 100 richest self-made women in America. They have a purported combined net worth of a whopping USD 4.6 billion. Among them are Indra Nooyi and Jayshree Ullal.

Jayshree Ullal, President and CEO of Arista Networks, a computer networking firm; Neerja Sethi, co-founder of IT consulting and outsourcing firm Synte; Neha Narkhede, co-founder and former chief technology officer (CTO) of cloud company Confluent; and PepsiCo’s former chair and CEO Indra Nooyi made it to Forbes list of ‘America’s Richest Self-Made Women’.

At the release of its ninth annual list last month, Forbes, had said, “Bolstered in part by a rebound in the stock market, they are cumulatively worth a record USD 124 billion, up nearly 12 per cent from a year ago.”

Indra Nooyi, the former chair and CEO of PepsiCo, retired in 2019 after 24 years with the company, half of which she spent in the top job. The 67-year-old has a net worth of USD 350 million and is ranked 77th on the list. Her fortune stems from stock she was granted while working at PepsiCo. As CEO, the 67-year-old thwarted a bid to break up PepsiCo, nearly doubled sales and introduced healthier products and environmentally friendly practices. Nooyi joined the board of Amazon in 2019 and grew up in India. She received an MBA from Yale before becoming one of corporate America’s few female CEOs in 2006.

Neerja Sethi, 68, ranked 25th on the list, has a net worth of USD 990 million. Syntel, co-founded in 1980 by Sethi and her husband Bharat Desai, was bought by French IT firm Atos SE for USD 3.4 billion in October 2018. Sethi got an estimated USD 510 million for her stake. She did her Bachelor of Arts/Science and Master of Business Administration from Delhi University and Master of Science from Oakland University.

Jayshree Ullal, ranked 15th on the list, has a net worth of USD 2.4 billion. She has been president and CEO of the publicly-traded Arista Networks since 2008 and owns about 2.4 per cent of its stock. Arista recorded revenue of nearly USD 4.4 billion in 2022. The 62-year-old studied electrical engineering at San Francisco State University and engineering management at Santa Clara University. She is also on the board of directors of Snowflake, a cloud computing company that went public in September 2020.

Meanwhile, 38-year-old Neha Narkhede is ranked 50th on the list with a net worth of USD 520 million. As a LinkedIn software engineer, she helped develop the open-source messaging system Apache Kafka to handle the networking site’s massive influx of data. In 2014, she and two LinkedIn colleagues left to found Confluent, which helps organisations process large amounts of data on Apache Kafka. The USD 586 million (2022 revenues) company went public in June 2021 at a USD 9.1 billion valuation; Narkhede owns around 6 per cent, according to Forbes. In March 2023, Narkhede announced her new company, fraud detection firm Oscilar, of which she is co-founder and CEO.

Diane Hendricks, the co-founder of ABC Supply, topped the list for the 6th time in a row. ABC Supply is one of the largest wholesale distributors of roofing, siding and windows in the US. Hendricks, aged 76, has a net worth of USD 15 billion, according to Forbes

In its endeavour to compile net worth, Forbes valued individual assets, including stakes in public companies, using stock prices from May 12, 2023; it also valued private companies by consulting with outside experts and comparing them with public companies conservatively.