Driving digital transformation

With passion, courage and strategic planning, brothers Nikhil and Nishant Rathi became entrepreneurs as teenagers, building three noteworthy businesses thereon.

- Pooja Mujumdar

Not everyone has the mettle of brothers Nikhil and Nishant Rathi to become entrepreneurs as teenagers. They were 17 and 15 respectively when they started developing websites for others as a hobby. This was in the 1990s. For the duo, balancing this and their studies was a challenge, as was turning their talent into a business venture, considering that as mere teenagers, convincing clients that they were providing a service that could change the face of their business was no easy task.

But there was something in them that told them to continue nevertheless, and today, the rewards of their efforts have far exceeded their expectations. The brothers presently helm three companies, namely Web Werks, which runs data centres at multiple locations in India and beyond; NeoSOFT Technologies, which offers information technology services and software solutions globally; and NextStar Venture Capital, which invests in tech start-ups.

Becoming entrepreneurs

Nikhil and Nishant Rathi launched Web Werks—their ‘business’ of developing websites—as a division of their father’s trading and investment business in Mumbai, in 1996. Investing their earnings—this includes the R1,500 from their very first client—to further their business, they started expanding in the areas of booking domain names, designing websites, and hosting websites on shared servers in the USA.