The Start-up She-shift

Women founders are reshaping India's start-up landscape-breaking biases, defying funding gaps, and proving that entrepreneurship is no longer a space they're expected to enter quietly or temporarily

- PALAK AGARWAL

BEAUTY AND PERSONAL care products retailer Nykaa and Niramai Health Analytix, which offers early breast cancer screening, are among India's startup success stories of the past decade.

Founded by Falguni Nayar and Geeta Manjunath, respectively, they paved the way for a generation of woman entrepreneurs in India. Their success broke the myth that startups were a male preserve. The days when women were listed as nominal co-founders just to unlock government benefits—although not entirely gone—no longer define the landscape.

As of June 2025, of the 170,000 startups in the country, 76,000 were led by women, generating over 1.7 million jobs, according to Dun and Bradstreet. The momentum is building. But is it enough? Not quite. Are we moving forward? Absolutely.

For startups led by women, the journey to success is anything but smooth. Building a startup is hard for anyone—but for women, the climb is often steeper.

Take Suta, the maker of handmade saris, blouses and other apparel, which derives its name from co-founders Sujata and Tanya Biswas. In less than 10 years of inception, the company has engaged 16,000 weavers, built a customer base of 300,000 and logs ₹76 crore in annual revenue. It sells its products online and also runs 18 stores.

Yet, co-founder Sujata Biswas isn't quite rah-rah when talking about the breakthrough achieved by women in the world of startups. When a woman wants to set up a business, she is still not taken seriously, she says. The siblings founded Suta in 2016.

"When we started out, entrepreneurship wasn't such a big conversation, nor was there a well-developed ecosystem for founders," says Sujata Biswas, who studied in College of Engineering and Technology, Bhubaneswar, and Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi.