At the age of 24, Harshita Arora from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh has achieved what many young entrepreneurs only dream about. She has become one of the youngest General Partners at Y Combinator, one of Silicon Valley’s most influential startup accelerators. The organization has backed some of the world’s biggest technology companies and startup founders.
Her appointment came less than a year after she joined Y Combinator as a Visiting Partner. During the Summer 2025 batch, she guided early-stage founders and worked closely with startup teams. In her new role, she will work with startups at different stages and help founders build and grow their companies.
Harshita’s journey stands apart because she did not follow the traditional path that many successful professionals take. She did not complete school in the usual way. She did not go through a top college degree program before entering the technology industry. Instead, she built her own path through coding, self-learning, and startup building, reported Jansatta.
She was born in 2002 to Ravinder Singh Arora and Jaswinder Kaur Arora in Saharanpur. Her father works in property investment while her mother is a homemaker. Harshita is their only child. Her parents describe her as a quiet and intelligent student who always performed very well in school. Teachers believed from an early age that she was different from other children.
Why did Harshita leave school?
When Harshita was studying in Class 9 at Pinewood School in Saharanpur in 2016, she took a big step. She told her parents that she did not want to continue school. She said she was not interested in subjects like Hindi, Sanskrit, and Social Studies. She wanted to focus on computers and learn programming instead.
Her parents found it very hard to understand her decision. Her father says that period was very stressful for the family. Harshita stopped attending classes and avoided family functions, trips, and social gatherings. She spent most of her time alone in her room with her laptop.
Her mother says the family felt confused and worried. They even tried arranging teachers for home studies, but nothing worked.
Harshita remained determined. Eventually, her parents accepted her decision because they had no other option.
Looking back, Harshita says she did not rebel against school. She simply rejected a system that depended too much on memorization. She felt disconnected from classroom learning and believed it did not match her interests.
During her early teenage years, she found interest in programming. A computer science teacher introduced her to tools like Scratch and MIT App Inventor. That exposure changed everything. Harshita started coding at the age of 13 and became deeply interested in technology.
She also read essays by startup thinker Paul Graham. His writing about startups, creativity, and building companies influenced her strongly. Around the same time, she watched “The Social Network,” the film based on Facebook’s creation. The movie shaped her ambitions and pushed her toward the startup world.
Soon after leaving school, Harshita joined a one-month training program at Salesforce in Bengaluru in 2016. The experience gave her exposure to enterprise software and developer ecosystems. It also showed her what the technology industry looked like outside textbooks and classrooms.
In 2017, she earned selection into LaunchX, a highly competitive entrepreneurship program held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. Only around 70 students received admission. Although the program fee was expensive, Harshita received financial aid and her family paid about $1,000.
For a few weeks in America, she worked with students from around the world on startup ideas. For the first time, she entered an environment that matched the world she had already started building online for herself.
However, when she returned to India later that year, uncertainty still surrounded her future. Her parents worried because there was no fixed plan ahead. Harshita again spent months inside her room, coding, reading, and teaching herself new skills.
She says those months shaped her mindset. She focused only on learning and experimenting. Her father often asked about her future plans, but she always replied that she would figure things out herself.
How Harshita built her first big success
In February 2018, Harshita surprised her family. She asked her father to read the next day’s newspaper because it carried a story about her work. Until then, her parents did not fully know what she had been building.
Harshita had developed a cryptocurrency portfolio tracking app. The app became available as a paid product on Apple’s App Store and reached the top category rankings. Her father says he could not believe what he saw. Harshita still remembers his reaction. He told her that she earned in months what had taken him years to build.
Later, another company acquired the app.
That same year, Harshita received the “Woman of the Year” award at the CryptoChicks Hackathon Conference in Toronto, Canada. She also secured the O-1 visa, which the United States grants to individuals with extraordinary abilities in fields such as technology, science, and business.
Harshita started AtoB with her co-founders in 2019. The company works on fuel cards and payment services for truck drivers and transport companies. In the beginning, they were not sure what kind of business they wanted to build. They tried many ideas for several months before deciding to work in trucking payments and finance.
After some time, the company grew fast and got thousands of customers. Later, AtoB’s value reached nearly $800 million.
In 2020, Harshita received the Bal Puraskar from Prime Minister Narendra Modi for her work on cryptocurrency applications. She came back to India to receive the award.
Another big moment came in 2021 when AtoB was selected for funding by Y Combinator. Harshita says success comes from not giving up, even during difficult times.
As Harshita built her career in Silicon Valley, her parents watched her success from Saharanpur. Her father says he still does not fully understand many things about the startup world, but he feels very proud of what his daughter has achieved.
He also speaks about the years they lost while she remained absorbed in work and technology. Her mother remembers the evenings when Harshita worked for hours and repeatedly asked for snacks between coding sessions. Those memories remain special for the family.
Despite her success, Harshita lives a very work-focused life. She says most of her daily routine is connected to technology and artificial intelligence. In her free time, she reads about AI tools and tries new technologies instead of spending time on hobbies.
In March 2025, Harshita joined Y Combinator as a Visiting Partner. On April 6 the same year, she received promotion to the role of General Partner. She says the system at YC rewards strong performance and contribution.
Today, her role involves identifying talented founders and helping early-stage startups grow. Her workdays often stretch past midnight.
Harshita says young people must stay updated with rapidly changing technologies if they want to build something meaningful. At the same time, she does not encourage everyone to leave college. She says very few people can succeed outside that structure because self-learning demands extreme discipline and persistence.