Pune-born Neha Narkhede holds the tag for India’s youngest self-made woman entrepreneur. She is one of the most prominent recent additions in the elite list of Indians who founded or led the biggest tech companies in the world.
Neha Narkhede became the 8th richest Indian woman in 2021 on the back of her company’s blockbuster IPO. At the time Neha’s net worth was pegged at Rs 13,380 crore in the Hurun India rich list. While she still kept the tag of India’s youngest self-made entrepreneur, her wealth dropped sharply in the 2022 Hurun Rich List to Rs 4,700 crore. This was a massive drop of over Rs 8,600 crore in around a year’s time.
Who is Neha Narkhede?
Neha was born and raised in Maharashtra’s college city Pune. She graduated from the Savitribai Phule Pune University in Computer Science. She then headed to the US for further studies at Georgia Tech. She started her career at software giant Oracle.
Neha is the co-creator of Apache Kafka, an open source messaging system that she helped develop while working at business networking firm LinkedIn. She left LinkedIn with two other employees in 2014 to found Confluent on the back of Apache Kafka.
Neha’s net worth was recorded at $360 million in 2019 by Forbes, growing rapidly to $600 million in 2020 and skyrocketing to $925 million in 2021. Her wealth then dropped to $490 million in 2022. Her current net worth stands at $520 million or around Rs 4,268 crore.
Neha is still a board member at Confluent but has also become a startup investor and advisor. In 2021, she founded her second venture Oscilar Inc which works in the cybersecurity space specific to securing online transactions. She lives in Palo Alto, California in the US.
