Trailblazers under 25

The list goes on. Generic Aadhaar was founded in 2018 by Arjun Deshpande when he was just 16 years old, with a mission to make high-quality healthcare and medicines affordable for all Indians. He went on to earn support from Ratan Tata and reshape India’s pharmaceutical landscape. In 2025, Mumbai teenager Dhravya Shah raised $2.6 million for his AI startup, Supermemory, founded in 2023 to help AI models retain information across sessions — addressing a critical technological gap. Backed by leading tech investors and executives, the venture reflects the growing influence of young innovators. Meanwhile, Udit Singhal founded Glass2Sand in 2021 at the age of 21 years. The zero-waste initiative converts discarded glass bottles into sand, promoting environmental sustainability.

These young trailblazers have one thing in common — despite being under 25 years, they are proving that ambition, resilience, and innovative thinking aren’t bound by age. They embrace risk early, adapt fast to challenges, and build ventures that disrupt traditional industries to create real impact.

Here are a few other early disruptors whose journeys highlight a bold generation redefining entrepreneurship, proving that age is no barrier when it comes to creating meaningful impact…

Delivering ‘craving’ for urban India

Aniket Shah (25), Ujjwal Sukheja (25) & Saran S (25)

Co-founders, Swish

At 4 in the evening, hunger arrives differently. It isn’t the planned lunch order or the late dinner scroll. It’s chai time — urgent, specific, and impatient. For Aniket Shah (25), Ujjwal Sukheja (25), and Saran S (25), that everyday craving revealed what India’s booming food-delivery economy had somehow missed.

The Bengaluru-based trio started food delivery startup Swish in 2024, delivering freshly prepared meals and snacks in 10 to 15 minutes and operating its own network of cloud kitchens located in high-demand residential areas of Bengaluru. Since Swish is positioned as a direct competitor to rapid-delivery services offered by giants like Swiggy (Bolt), Zomato (Blinkit/ Bistro), and Zepto (Cafe), the trio felt the need to create a niche for urban consumers accustomed to hyperlocal convenience.

“Groceries arrive in minutes, plumbers in hours, and packages the same day. Food delivery, however, has remained stuck in a narrow lane. Despite its scale, the experience has barely evolved over the past five years. Prices fluctuate, delivery times stretch, and ‘surge fees’ test patience. More importantly, the system caters to planned meals, not spontaneous cravings. That gap is where dissatisfaction lives,” says Shah.

While the problem wasn’t demand, it was distance as traditional food-delivery platforms depend on scattered restaurants, long preparation times, and unpredictable logistics.

“Speed is meaningless without quality. Fast food shouldn’t mean compromised food. Our philosophy shapes everything from menu design to kitchen layouts, allowing our brand to move fast without cutting corners. We flipped the model by operating our neighbourhood kitchens and getting control over sourcing, preparation, consistency, and speed. By shortening the physical and operational distance between kitchen and consumer, we could do what others couldn’t — deliver samosas, fries, or chai while they were still piping hot,” adds Shah.

With stores catering to very specific areas within a small radius from the kitchen, there are clearly defined routes optimising for traffic and signals to be able to deliver orders very quickly. “Drivers aren’t penalised for late orders and their incentives aren’t linked to quicker deliveries. By operating our own neighbourhood kitchens, we control the sourcing of the best-in-class ingredients, preparation, and consistency using automated kitchen equipment,” shares Shah.

In 2025, Swish raised over $16 million in cumulative capital, deployed for kitchens, supply chain, and product. So rather than expanding recklessly across cities, the strategy prioritises depth before breadth. The brand launched its services in Delhi and Gurugram in 2026, while it raised $24 million in a funding round on September 10, led by Bertelsmann India Investments (BII). The funds will be utilised to deepen the cloud kitchen network across Bengaluru and Delhi-NCR (including Gurugram, Noida, Delhi, and Ghaziabad), scale supply chain infrastructure and kitchen automation, targeting over 1,000 kitchens in the next five years. The company’s monthly order volume has tripled since March, crossing 1 million orders per month.

“Density comes first. If you don’t win a neighbourhood, you can’t win a city. Each micro-market is designed for density, not sprawl, with individual units achieving profitability relatively quickly and a clear path toward contribution margin positivity as scale increases,” says Saran, who is inspired by long-term builders and not one person — people who compound effort, stay close to customers, and adapt without losing their principles. That mindset of fundamentals-first execution shapes Swish’s leadership culture.

Bringing natural sunlight indoors

Ishat Jain (21)

Founder, Sunrooof

At an age when most young people are still figuring out college majors, Ishat Jain was already questioning a far more basic assumption: that the classroom is the only place where real learning happens. Now 21, Jain is the founder of Sunrooof, billed as the world’s first wellness-focused lighting system — a technology that recreates the experience and biological benefits of natural sunlight indoors. But the journey to get started when Jain left formal schooling after the eighth grade, not out of rebellion, but conviction.

He believed his deepest learning was coming from books, mentors, and experience. His father backed the decision — a leap of faith that Jain calls the most defining moment of his life. “If you’re stepping out, commit to learning elsewhere,” his father told him. Jain did exactly that.

Before Sunrooof, his path zigzagged wildly. He was a nationally ranked tennis player, finishing 18th in the Under-18 category, and trained at the Rafael Nadal Academy in Spain. The sport taught him discipline, stamina, and how to lose without breaking — skills that would soon matter far more off the court.

By the age of 20, Jain had launched eight ventures, all of which failed. There was a vegan smoothie bar, a vegan leather brand, a filmmaking production house, a prefabricated glass-house concept, and even a luxury lighting line. Each collapse stung, but none were wasted. “Failure is data. The experiments sharpen my instincts, toughened my resolve, and prepared me for what would come next,” says the Delhi-based founder.

Sunrooof emerged from a growing unease with modern life. Jain noticed how disconnected people had become from natural sunlight, spending most of their days indoors under harsh, artificial lighting. The effects — disrupted sleep cycles, lower energy, heightened stress — were rarely traced back to light itself. So, what if sunlight could be brought back into indoor spaces?

The answer took more than four years of research and development, over 100 prototypes, and a rethinking of light from first principles. The brand uses layered optical lenses, precision controls, and custom-engineered components to replicate the depth, softness, and rhythm of real daylight.

Jain’s installations are found in premium homes, offices, hotels, retail spaces, and wellness centres. His clients include celebs like Shilpa Shetty Kundra and hotel brands like JW Marriott. “Customers don’t buy it for energy efficiency or price. They buy it for impact,” adds Jain.

There is also a quieter ambition at work. Growing up, Jain’s father often pointed out that while India hosted many global brands, very few Indian companies became global leaders themselves.

Sunrooof, says Jain, is his attempt to change that, not as an “Indian brand going global, but as a global brand born in India”.

Meanwhile, the brand closed FY 2024-25 with Rs 15 crore in revenue, is tracking Rs 50 crore in FY2025-26, and projects Rs 150 crore in 2026-27, all without external funding. The company is profitable on a per-unit basis, bootstrapped from personal savings and reinvested revenues — an unusual path in a startup ecosystem obsessed with scale-at-all-costs.

After consolidating in Indian metros such as Bengaluru and Hyderabad, Sunrooof is now prioritising international expansion in Dubai and the wider GCC region, followed by Israel, and later markets like Canada and Scandinavia, places where sunlight deprivation is both common and costly. For Jain, starting young was never about age or headlines. It was about time, time to fail, to learn, and to build conviction.

His advice is blunt: “Respect real work over resumes, surround yourself with people smarter than you, and build companies around problems, not trends.”

Simplifying beauty without excess

Seethala Karipineni (23)

Founder, Saka Organics

When Seethala Karipineni, 23, talks about building a personal care brand, she rarely begins with products or profits. Instead, she goes back to a school project at Rishi Valley School in Andhra Pradesh, where a soap-making exercise quietly set the course for what would later become Saka Organics.

As a student, Karipineni worked closely with rural communities, learning traditional formulations and natural ingredients while watching women turn age-old skills into livelihoods. Yet the work remained informal, undervalued and invisible in the larger economy. “That contrast stayed with me. There was knowledge, labour and value — but very little structure,” she recalls.

Years later, as the personal care market exploded with increasingly complex routines and chemical-heavy formulations, Karipineni began to see a disconnect. On one side was an industry obsessed with excess; on the other, traditional skills, particularly those held by rural women, were steadily being pushed out. The solution lay in building a business that could bridge both worlds: simplified, transparent personal care rooted in traditional knowledge, but scaled through modern systems.

The idea formally took shape in 2020, while scaling up its operations and moving into an FDA-approved manufacturing facility in Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh. That’s when Karipineni founded Saka Organics, and officially established it as a brand in 2022.

Rather than rushing into retail shelves, she took a deliberately pragmatic route. In its early years, Saka Organics focused on B2B partnerships, supplying soaps, handwashes and personal care products to hospitality groups, institutions and corporate clients. The approach provided predictable demand and allowed the company to understand scale, pricing and operations without the pressures of consumer marketing.

At the same time, Karipineni tested products directly with consumers through flea markets, pop-ups and exhibitions — not as brand showcases, but as live research labs. “Those interactions became our feedback loop. They told us what worked, what didn’t, and what people actually needed,” she says.

As volumes grew, so did the need for control. The company soon invested in a dedicated FDA-approved manufacturing facility, complete with defined SOPs, testing protocols, and research and stability chambers. Bringing manufacturing and quality control under one roof not only improved consistency but also formalised employment for a workforce that is predominantly women-led, a deliberate return to the founder’s earliest influences.

Today, Saka Organics operates through a fully integrated value chain, spanning responsible sourcing, in-house product development, manufacturing and distribution. While the scale has evolved, Karipineni insists the philosophy has not. “Simplify personal care, do more with less, and build a transparent supply chain that can last for products ranging from skincare, haircare to oral care, bath salts, lip balm, scrub, soap, tooth care,” says Karipineni.

The beauty products use natural raw materials like a Saka anti-hairfall oil made with neem, basil, fenugreek seeds, and coconut oil, while its conditioner powder is made of sunflower oil, coconut oil, and natural butters. The products are packaged using glass, paper and cardboard. But this year, Saka Organics is sharpening its focus, intentionally moving towards fewer, better products designed to replace multiple steps in a routine. “Less is more,” Karipineni says, for consumers and for the supply chain alike.

From a business standpoint, the brand is pivoting to a D2C-first model, with online channels leading growth and a small, curated offline presence playing a supporting role. Over the next 18 months, the company plans to increase operating investment by 40-50%, largely towards strengthening its digital infrastructure — website, CRM and customer analytics — alongside performance marketing optimised for repeat purchases rather than quick wins. “Supply chain and fulfillment are also receiving attention, with investments aimed at tighter inventory planning, faster dispatch timelines and stronger quality controls. The goal is not speed but sustainability. By the end of 2026, D2C is expected to contribute 65% of revenues, with an annual growth target of 30–35% — firmly anchored in profitability,” she says.

But that doesn’t mean starting early has less to do with age and more with exposure. “Small experiences shape how you think later,” says Karipineni, who feels, “Clarity comes from being on the ground. My perspective has been shaped by people who build steadily and stay close to the work — particularly the rural women, their consistency and resilience, who continue to guide how Saka Organics grows: patiently, purposefully, and without excess.”

Shaping confidence with functionality

Maadhav Saxena (25) & Ragini Saxena (25)

Co-founders, Invogue

The year 2026 seems to be bold and loud for the women’s shapewear fashion brand, Invogue. The brand recently collaborated with actor Malaika Arora for a digital campaign to promote its specialised shapewear designed for Indian body types. In the launch year 2023-24, the brand clocked Rs 5.3 crore in revenue, and this year, projects Rs 8 crore, as it expands product lines, categories, and channel availability, while securing a Rs 2-crore deal from Aman Gupta on Shark Tank India Season 5.

“It’s a validation that elevated both visibility and credibility,” says founder Maadhav Saxena, 25, whose entry into India’s fast-growing fashion market was a response to frustration — deeply personal, and widely shared. “My co-founder Ragini Saxena was struggling with shapewear in the Indian market. The options either didn’t work or made her feel bad about herself. That’s when we realised there was a real gap,” recalls the Delhi-based founder.

The bootstrapped direct-to-consumer (D2C) brand was built around a simple but powerful idea: shapewear should support women, not suffocate them — physically or emotionally. Designed specifically with Indian body types and everyday movement in mind, Invogue’s products function as smart base layers. They feature targeted sculpting, breathable and skin-friendly fabrics, seamless construction, anti-roll designs, and flexible compression zones engineered to move with the body, never against it.

“Shapewear should do more than shape silhouettes. It should empower women to dress boldly, move freely, and feel supported from within — every single day,” believes Saxena.

Unlike many legacy players that prioritise extreme compression, Invogue’s approach balances firm support with comfort. The result is a product line that blends functionality with confidence — addressing both performance and self-perception. While the company remains in a growth and investment phase — choosing to reinvest rather than disclose profits — the trajectory signals a strong product-market fit in a category ripe for disruption.

“I feel that the next generation should focus more on ‘why’ rather than ‘when’ if they want to start something. If your ‘why’ is strong enough, it has a much higher probability of becoming a success,” adds Saxena.

That philosophy shapes how Invogue was built. “If something frustrates you or affects you personally, that’s where the strongest businesses come from. Stay patient, listen to feedback, and don’t rush scale before product-market fit. Consistency and clarity matter far more than speed,” is Saxena’s advice for young founders. But if its foundation is any indication, built on empathy, engineering, and a strong “why”, both Saxena are shaping far more than silhouettes. They are shaping a new narrative for confidence in Indian fashion.

Making learning more personal

Imran Choudhary (17)

Founder, Lagnever AI

By Sugandha Mukherjee

At 17, Imran Choudhary is balancing school with running an AI startup. The teenager from Doongi village in Jammu & Kashmir’s Rajouri district founded Lagnever AI, an ed-tech platform designed to function as an intelligent study assistant for students.

The idea emerged from Choudhary’s own experience as a student. “I started Lagnever AI because I saw a gap in the way students were learning. Students have access to an enormous amount of information, but getting the right explanation at the right time, in a way they actually understand, can still be difficult,” says Choudhary. Lagnever AI offers automatic note-making, quiz generation, doubt solving, tutoring and career guidance. Within six months of its launch, the app crossed 10,000 downloads and reached a reported valuation of `5 crore. Choudhary was also selected for an international founders’ programme associated with BlackRock, featuring 60 young entrepreneurs from around the world.

For Choudhary, scaling the company means more than simply adding users. “For us, growth is not just about acquiring more users. It is about building something students genuinely find useful and then expanding that usefulness.”

Running a company alongside school, however, has meant learning to manage competing priorities. “It definitely isn’t easy,” he says. “I am still a student, so there are days when academics have to come first and days when the company requires more attention,” he adds.

His biggest challenge has been building a technology company while learning the basics of running a business. “The journey has taught me that building a company is much less about having one great idea and much more about consistently executing, learning and adapting.”

Choudhary’s long-term ambition is to take Lagnever beyond being another AI tool. “I want it to become a learning platform that makes understanding concepts easier, more interactive, and personal for students,” he adds.

More ‘flour’ power to women

Naavya Shah (17)

Founder, Aata Girl

By Sugandha Mukherjee

For Naavya Shah, the idea behind Aata Girl began with a visit to a women’s shelter in Mumbai.

Shah was 13 when she co-founded Dressing Hearts, an initiative that collected and donated refurbished clothes to underserved communities. During a visit to Shantighar, a women’s shelter, she learnt that flour was among the everyday necessities the women struggled to afford.

“One kg of aata can mean so much to someone,” the 17-year-old says. She began funding monthly donations of around 50 kg of aata through proceeds from bake sales. But Shah wanted to create something more sustainable than donations. Her search led her to women-run flour mills and eventually to Aata Girl.

The social enterprise sources fresh flour from a women-run mill and seeks to give the women involved greater control over pricing, customer interactions and earnings, rather than routing income through middlemen.

The business now handles 30 to 35 kg of orders a week, with Shah managing sourcing, packing and delivery schedules around her school hours. So far, Aata Girl says it has sold more than 3,000 kg of flour, supported 31 women, served over 350 families and generated more than Rs 2.25 lakh in community impact.

Shah also co-founded Girls with Power’s India chapter to support young women entrepreneurs, and is working on a coffee table book documenting the stories of six women entrepreneurs. She now wants Aata Girl to evolve into a network of women-run mills and delivery partners across Mumbai and eventually expand through quick-commerce platforms. “I want any woman running a mill to be able to plug into fair pricing, real customers, and real income, without needing a middleman,” Shah adds.