Four Indian women who moved to America and went on to make $4 billion

Four Indian-origin women have featured in a list of America's 100 richest self-made women. Jayshree Ullal, Indra Nooyi and two others have a combined net worth of $4.06 billion, according to the list.

The four businesswomen were recognised in the list of Forbes America’s Richest Self-Made Women. The list ranked the country's most successful women entrepreneurs, entertainers and executives. Ullal, who was at no. 15, surpassed iconic pop singer Rihanna, while Diane Hendricks, the chairperson of ABS Supplies topped the list with a net worth of $15 billion.

Jayshree Ullal, ranked 15th on the list, has a net worth of $2.4 billion. She has been president and CEO of the publicly-traded Arista Networks since 2008 and owns about 2.4 per cent of its stock. Arista recorded revenue of nearly USD 4.4 billion in 2022. She is also on the board of directors of Snowflake, a cloud computing company that went public in September 2020. The 62-year-old studied electrical engineering at San Francisco State University and engineering management at Santa Clara University.

Neerja Sethi, 68, ranked 25th on the list, has a net worth of $990 million. Syntel, co-founded in 1980 by Sethi and her husband Bharat Desai, was bought by French IT firm Atos SE for USD 3.4 billion in October 2018. Sethi got an estimated USD 510 million for her stake. She did her Bachelor of Arts/Science and Master of Business Administration from Delhi University and Master of Science from Oakland University.

Neha Narkhede, 38, is ranked 50th on the list with a net worth of $520 million. As a LinkedIn software engineer, she helped develop the open-source messaging system Apache Kafka to handle the networking site's massive influx of data. In 2014, she and two LinkedIn colleagues left to found Confluent, which helps organisations process large amounts of data on Apache Kafka. The USD 586 million (2022 revenues) company went public in June 2021 at a USD 9.1 billion valuation; Narkhede owns around 6 per cent, Forbes said. In March 2023, Narkhede announced her new company, fraud detection firm Oscilar, where she is co-founder and CEO.

Indra Nooyi, the former chair and CEO of PepsiCo, retired in 2019 after 24 years with the company, half of which she spent in the top job. The 67-year-old has a net worth of $350 million and is ranked 77th on the list. As CEO, the 67-year-old thwarted a bid to break up PepsiCo, nearly doubled sales and introduced healthier products and environmentally friendly practices. Her fortune stems from stock she was granted while working at PepsiCo. Nooyi joined the board of Amazon in 2019 and grew up in India. She received an MBA from Yale before becoming one of corporate America's few female CEOs in 2006.