Falguni Nayar

Falguni Nayar was born in Mumbai in 1963 to a family running a small business, and after an MBA from India's top management institute she spent more than two decades climbing the ranks of investment banking, eventually becoming managing director of Kotak Mahindra Capital, one of India's leading investment banks. It was a demanding, prestigious career, and by most measures a settled one.

In 2012, at the age of forty-nine, she left it to start something of her own: an online beauty and cosmetics retailer called Nykaa, built on the observation that Indian women had little reliable access to beauty products or advice suited to their skin tones and needs, and that most existing retail felt aimed at a narrow, wealthy slice of customers. Colleagues and even some family members questioned why she would abandon a secure senior role to compete against far larger, better funded companies in an unglamorous logistics-heavy business.

She invested her own savings, hired carefully, and built Nykaa slowly around detailed content and customer trust rather than discounting, eventually adding physical stores and its own product lines. The company's 2021 stock market listing made her one of India's few self-made female billionaires, and the first woman to take an Indian unicorn public as its founder.

She has spoken about the discomfort of restarting a career from nothing in middle age, and about wanting to prove that a business built carefully, without shortcuts, could still move fast enough to win.