Meet Neha Narkhede, the 50th richest self-made woman in America

The self-made Indian businesswoman Neha Narkhede is rated 50th on Forbes’ list of the “America’s 100 Richest Self-Made Women” for 2023. She now has a $520 million net worth.

Confluent was established in 2014 by Neha and her two teammates. The firm offers cloud technologies that help several enterprises manage enormous amounts of data. She spent five years as the business’s Chief Technology and Product Officer. At a $9.1 billion value, it went public in 2021. She presently has a stake in the business of over 6%.

After Confluent, Neha launched Oscilar with Sachin Kulkarni in 2021. The business, which specializes in identifying fraud, offers services including account defense, content integrity, rapid credit decisions, payment protection, underwriting, and more. She presently serves as the company’s CEO and has made investments totaling about Rs 160 crore.

Pune Institute of Computer Technology (PICT), run by SCTR, awarded Narkhede a Bachelor of Science in Engineering. She traveled to the US in 2006 to earn her Master’s in Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

She said in an interview with Forbes that she moved overseas in order to pursue a career in technology. She was employed as a software engineer at Oracle and later at LinkedIn after completing her degree. Together with her coworkers Jay Kreps and Jun Rao, Neha put up the Apache Kafka open source platform at LinkedIn.

She credits her father for her accomplishment. In an interview, she said that her father had read books and told her stories of women who had shattered the “glass ceiling” for them. Neha Narkhede suggested reading Indira Gandhi’s biography. She read about Indra Nooyi and Kiran Bedi as a child. Reading these tales gave her a feeling of empowerment.

Currently, Neha resides in Palo Alto, California. The 37-year-old is the youngest self-made woman entrepreneur to appear on India’s wealthy list, according to IIFL Wealth Hurun.