Neha Narkhede — The youngest self-made woman entrepreneur in India

Sep 22, 2022

By: Vaamanaa Sethi

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Who is Neha Narkhede?

She is an Indian-American technology entrepreneur and co-founder of Confluent, a streaming data technology company.

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Hurun report

The IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List 2022 named her the youngest self-made woman entrepreneur of India at the age of 37.

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Net worth and ranking

She has ₹4,700 crore in wealth and bagged the eighth position among the top 10 richest Indian women and 336th position out of 1,103 individuals in the overall IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List 2022.

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Career and background

Before co-founding the tech company, she worked at Oracle and then moved to LinkedIn, where she was the lead of streams infrastructure.

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Apache Kafka

While working at LinkedIn, Narkhede created the platform Apache Kafka, along with Jun Rao and Jay Kreps. She even co-authored a book named ‘Kafka: The Definitive Guide,’ with Gwen Shapira and Todd Palino. It talks about the technology behind Apache Kafka.

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Her achievements

In 2022, she was listed as one of America’s Self-made Women by Forbes. She was also listed in the list of America's and the world's top 50 Women in Tech by Forbes in 2018. She won the Oracle Groundbreaker Award the same year.

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Education

Born in the city of Pune, she got her bachelor’s degree in computer science from Savitribhai Phule Pune University. In 2007, she got her master’s degree from Georgia Institute of Technology.

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Her entrepreneurial journey

In an interview with Forbes, Narkhede spoke about her struggles during her initial days in the US as an entrepreneur. “We had a relatively difficult period of anti-Asian racism in the last couple of years,” Narkhede said.

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She further added, “The heightened anti-Asian racism has made me feel sad and

isolated and very disappointed by the shattering of the very foundation of America, as I thought it to be.”

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About Confluent

The tech company went public in June 2021 at a $9.1 billion valuation. Currently, it has reached a valuation of $11.4 billion.

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