Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ Lists Dozens of Indian American Entrepreneurs in Social Impact, Enterprise Technology, Manufacturing & Industry

Nirman Dave and Tapojit Debnath Tapu, cofounders of cofounders of Obviously AI, were selected in the Enterprise Technology category. (hampshire.edu photo)

India-West Staff Reporter

As India-West continues its reports on the Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ list for 2022 released earlier this month, over a dozen Indian Americans were featured in the category of Social Impact, Enterprise Technology, and Manufacturing & Industry.

Following are the Indian Americans selected for the list, by category:

Social Impact

*Devesh Bharadwaj, cofounder of Pani Energy, is tackling the worldwide clean water crisis, said Forbes. Pani Energy, based in Victoria, Canada, optimizes water treatment plants to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and improve sustainability.

*Rahul Gupta-Iwasaki and Mark Ulrich are cofounders of Every.org, whichaims to build accessible giving infrastructure for every charity, donor, and developer. For charities, Every.org provides free online tools that optimize peer-to-peer fundraising and processes donations of cash, cryptocurrencies, or stocks. For donors, Every.org enables them to explore and donate to over 1 million nonprofits. And for developers, Every.org has a Charity API that allows them to easily create unique giving experiences, said Forbes. The company, started by the Stanford grads, has helped over 1,600 nonprofits to raise over $4.5 M on its platform since launching in March 2020.

*Anisha Gupta, cofounder of Bluebird Climate, aims to decarbonize the consumer products industry through her climate tech company Bluebird Climate. Bluebird is building a software that is helping brands tackle the 95% of company emissions that live within their products and supply chains, and allows them to minimize the impact of their operations on the planet, noted Forbes.

Enterprise Technology

* Tsion Behailu, Aparna Dhinakaran and Manisha Sharma, founding team of Arize AI. The startup, which enables customers to monitor the performance of AI models using software that looks for things such as unforeseen biases in algorithms, has $24.5 million in funding from Battery Ventures, Foundation Capital and Trinity Ventures, among others, said Forbes.

*Yunyu Lin and Rahul Sengottuvelu, cofounders of Cohere, whose software allows customer-support and onboarding teams to view and control customers’ computer screens without any need for clients to download a remote access code. It has $3.5 million in funding, according to Forbes.

* Ganesh Datta, Anish Dhar and Nikhil Unni are cofounders of Cortex, a company which helps developers and engineers explore, understand, and operate the microservices used in building applications. Its platform documents service architecture, audits service health and prevents outages, noted Forbes.

* Pulkit Jaiswal and Imogen Low cofounded nwo.ai. Using machine learning and human metadata to identify global shifts early and throughout the trend lifecycle, nwo.ai enables corporations and governments to gain insights on sectors ranging from consumer products to global war, according to Forbes. Jaiswal, a drone pioneer and serial entrepreneur, developed geopolitical trading signals for hedge funds.

* Krish Ramineni and Sam Udotong cofounded Fireflies.ai to make virtual meetings easy for participants. Their cloud-based technology automatically transcribes and takes bullet notes from user calls and meetings, identifying key takeways from the transcription, said Forbes. Over 300,000 organizations and 2.5 million people have received AI-generated meeting notes from Fireflies.ai.

* Nirman Dave and Tapojit Debnath Tapu, cofounders of Obviously AI, hope to enable people without technical knowledge to build AI models that can be integrated into existing cloud services and databases.

* Ashwin Sreenivas, founder of Campfire. As a teenager, Sreenivas won two gold medals for India in the International Junior Science Olympiad. In 2020, he built Campfire during the Covid-19 pandemic, to keep online communities strongly connected. The company’s community-building platform allows clients to broadcast messages to relevant community members while storing all member responses centrally, said Forbes.

Education

*Amrutha Vasan and Aditya Vishwanath are cofounders of Inspirit, whichprovides a user-generated collection of K-12 science coursework and supplements such as virtual labs and VR simulations, using video to hold the attention of young users, noted Forbes.

* Manu Meel, CEO of BridgeUSA. Anger and violent protests on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley in 2017 over a planned visit by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos inspired then-freshman Manu Meel to establish BridgeCal, the third chapter (after Notre Dame and the University of Colorado-Boulder) of a nationwide 501(c)3 movement on college campuses that aims to promote democracy, not partisanship, said Forbes. After graduation, Meel became the national lead of San Francisco-based BridgeUSA as it expanded to 43 chapters in 19 states.

* Rohan Gupta,Anil Jason and David Silinare cofounders Quillbot. Gupta sold his AI writing startup Quillbot to Course Hero in August, a year after raising $4.25 million in a seed funding round, according to Forbes. When users paste in text, Quillbot’s AI can paraphrase writing to improve syntax and style, summarize long papers and articles to pull out the main ideas, check spelling and grammar or create citations.

*Simon Komlos, Bolun Li and Simran Singh cofounded Zogo. Credit unions and banks in all 50 states partner with Durham, North Carolina-based Zogo Finance to engage, educate and earn the trust of young adults, teaching financial literacy using a gamified smartphone app, said Forbes.

Manufacturing & Industry

* Rajat Bhageria founded San Francisco-based Chef Robotics to automate food service. The nearly three-year-old firm has raised $7.7 million from Kleiner Perkins and others to bring robots to the kitchen with the goal of increasing production, enhancing consistency and minimizing food waste, according to Forbes.

* Anvesh Gurijala and Michael Segal are cofounders of Boston Materials, which was founded in 2016 and has since raised $14 million. Their first material, called Z-axis Fiber, made with reclaimed feedstock, is unlike any metal, polymer or composite and enables applications that include keeping electronics cool and making highly effective hydrogen fuel cells, noted Forbes.