Top 5 India's Most Influential Teens Of 2018
The 5 influential teens on this list have shown us that you don’t need to be grey to wield power and profoundly influence lives. These teens come from a diverse range of backgrounds and professions, reflecting not just the optimistic, youthful population of India but also its dynamic economy. Meet the leaders of tomorrow, today.
Ritesh Agarwal
Ritesh Agarwal has had an interesting childhood. He was never fond of studies so he dropped formal education out of his plans. The idea of Oravel Stays struck him when he was 18. The basic idea was a budget hotel chain that provides B&B. Realizing that no other service offered a room for a budget traveller, Ritesh took the idea from Oravel stays to OYO rooms and voila! Agarwal started OYO with 11 only rooms in a Gurgaon hotel. This is one of the best successful entrepreneurs stories in India. Today, OYO has 65000 rooms in about 5500 properties across 170 cities in India.
Ritesh started his entrepreneurial journey when he was 17 years old. He dropped out of college and launched his first start‐up Oravel Stays Pvt. Ltd. in the year 2012. Oravel was designed as a platform to enable listing and booking of budget accommodation. Being an avid traveler, he soon realized that the budget hospitality sector lacked predictability. Therefore, he pivoted Oravel to OYO Rooms in 2013 with the key proposition of offering affordable and standardized accommodation.
Ritesh Agarwal has benefited the society in more than one ways. He has also managed to achieve what most of the people only think of. Below listed are some of the accomplishments of this teenager. He has been named among thetop 50 entrepreneurs by the TATA first dot awards in 2013. Finalist of the global student Entrepreneurship Awards India. He has been named one of the 8 hottest teenage startup founders in the world by a BusinessInsider in the year 2013. He is the World’s youngest CEO at 17.
Trishneet Arora
At the age of 25, Trishneet Arora is an author, a self-described friendly hacker and the founder and CEO of cyber security startup TAC Security Solutions. The India-based company performs Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing for corporates identifying weaknesses in their cyber security.
He has received funding from angel investor Vijay Kedia and support from former VP of IBM, William May. In 2017, Arora was listed among the 50 Most Influential Young Indians by GQ Magazine, while August 25, 2017 was proclaimed “Trishneet Arora Day”, by the Mayor of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
According to a 2017 report about him in Forbes India magazine, “Arora’s CV reads far from perfect”. It says that when he failed in Class 8, “he dashed almost all hopes of a secure future”. Then, he signed up for distance education but failed again in Class 12. “I was never interested in studies. I was always a backbencher,” Arora was quoted as saying, “As a child, I did all the things I was not supposed to do and kept my parents on their toes.”
One of the youngest ‘ethical hackers’ in the country, Arora was just 19 when he started TAC Security in 2013, the report said. About the connotation of the word ‘hack’, Arora described it as an art and said, “There is no doubt that it also means that a person with the right skills can even hack into any bank and get millions of dollars but, remember, the next moment, he could also be behind bars. It depends on what he wants to nurture.”
Advait Thakur
15-year-old Indian tech prodigy, who started using computers at age six, launched his first website at age nine, and has been working with Google’s AI and Cloud Platform for a couple of years now. Advait Thakur is an Indian computer programmer and Teenage Internet entrepreneur. He is the founder of Apex Infosys India , and is currently its chief executive officer. He is Google, Bing and Hubspot Certified Professional. Ranked 4th in Wikia’s Young Entrepreneurs Under 20 list of 2017 and The Startup India’s ‘Top 10 Young Entrepreneurs In India 2018’.
Advait is in a different league from the average pre-teen. In 2015, at age twelve, he founded a tech company ‘Apex Infosys India’ which is now an Accredited Domain Name Registrar and an organisation that provides Digital Solutions. Apex Infosys India is also involved primarily in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning & IOT Sector.
In 2017, at age fourteen, he built “Technology Quiz,” an app to help kids learn about Science & Technology which Actions On Google accepted after rejecting it five times. An incredible achievement for a child who loves to code but is largely self-taught. A programmer since he was eleven, Advait is one of the youngest entrepreneurs and web developers in the world.
During Advait’s high school years, he worked for the NGOs name Satish Haware Divyang Centre & Beautiful Tommorow Foundation and helped them in getting more audience through online platform by providing them digital marketing services for Free, for which he was was felicitated by Hon. Rajkumar Badole(Cabinet Minister, Social Justice). He also developed an app called “Autism Awareness” for Google Assistant which helps people to learn about autism and related disorders and their symptoms, etc. He is currently working on a product based on IOT to offer solutions to some of India’s most challenging problems.
Kavita Shukla
The R&D for Kavita Shukla’s company, Fenugreen, cost little more than a kid’s science project — which, in fact, it was. At age 12, Shukla visited India, where a cup of her grandmother’s homebrewed spice tea seemed to help her stave off the ill effects of accidentally drinking tap water. Returning home to Maryland, she spent several years trying to re-create that benefit, mixing kitchen spices in jars of pond water and then applying them to produce.
Eventually she came up with the idea of infusing the spices into sheets of paper; she even created her own paper blend, using $25 worth of materials from a craft store. Now Fenugreen, based in Columbia, Maryland, makes a product that is at once humble and potentially transformative: spice-infused FreshPaper, which keeps food fresh by inhibiting bacterial and fungal growth. Shukla worked on her product throughout high school and college, investing her own money along the way. At 17, she spent $1,500 (won at science fairs) to obtain a patent, saving on legal fees by filing for and defending it herself. But when she got to Harvard, her attempts to create a global nonprofit couldn’t get enough interest from potential donors and ultimately proved, well, fruitless.
Interest from investors is strong, but Shukla prefers to go it alone for now, so Fenugreen can concentrate on social mission — not always the top priority for VCs. Robust sales to retailers and online customers has allowed it to do so.
Sreelakshmi Suresh
A name to remember, Sreelakshmi Suresh, the youngest web designer and CEO in the world has many accolades to her name. A recipient of many national and international awards, she started climbing the success ladder at the mere age of 10, when she established eDesign — a venture which is now a web designing company that offers SEO, web design, and other web — related services. Sreelakshmi has developed over 100 websites for renowned institutions and organizations across India!
Ever since her childhood, the tech-savvy Sreelakshmi always had an eye for computers. She started using computers at the age of 3. Her exemplary appetite for learning about Web Designing helped her to get into the groove. She developed a habit of designing at the age of 4 and finally had designed a website at the age of 6.
She is currently pursuing her grade 12 education from a secondary school in Kozhikode, Kerala. Last year, she achieved her aim of developing 50 websites; this year, she aims to double that number. With her ideas and hard work, she is sure to achieve it too. This is one of the best successful entrepreneurs stories in India.
