Jayshree Ullal, Neerja Sethi, Neha Narkhede, Indra Nooyi: Meet Indian-origin women on 'America's Richest Self-Made Women' List

Four Indian-origin women have made it to the Forbes list of America's 100 richest self-made women, with a combined net worth of a $4.06 billion. Jayshree Ullal, president and CEO of Arista Networks, a computer networking firm; Neerja Sethi, co-founder of IT consulting and outsourcing firm Synte; Neha Narkhede, co-founder and former chief technology officer (CTO) of cloud company Confluent; and Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo's former chair and CEO, are the four Indian-origin women who have been named by Forbes.

Here's all you need to know about these women leaders who have been featured in the list:

Jayshree Ullal

Ranked 15th on the list, Ullal has a net worth of $2.4 billion. She has been president and CEO of the publicly-traded Arista Networks since 2008 and owns about 2.4 per cent of its stock. Arista recorded revenue of nearly $4.4 billion in 2022.

Ullal is also on the board of directors of Snowflake, a cloud computing company that went public in September 2020. She has also worked with semiconductor giant Advanced Micro Devices, Fairchild Semiconductor and software firm Cisco Systems.

The 62-year-old studied electrical engineering at San Francisco State University and engineering management at Santa Clara University.

Neerja Sethi

Ranked 25th on the list, Sethi, 68, has a net worth of $990 million. Neerja Sethi co-founded IT consulting and outsourcing firm Syntel with her husband Bharat Desai in 1980 in their apartment in Troy, Michigan. In October 2018, French IT firm Atos SE bought Syntel for $3.4 billion and Sethi got an estimated $510 million for her stake.

She did her Bachelor of Arts/Science and Master of Business Administration from Delhi University and Master of Science from Oakland University.

Neha Narkhede

Narkhede, 38, is ranked 50th on the list with a net worth of $520 million. As a LinkedIn software engineer, she helped develop the open-source messaging system Apache Kafka to handle the networking site's massive influx of data. In 2014, she and two LinkedIn colleagues left to found Confluent, which helps organisations process large amounts of data on Apache Kafka.

The $586 million (2022 revenues) company went public in June 2021 at a $9.1 billion valuation; Narkhede owns around 6 per cent, Forbes said.

In March 2023, Narkhede announced her new company, fraud detection firm Oscilar, where she is co-founder and CEO.

Indra Nooyi

Nooyi, the former chair and CEO of PepsiCo, retired in 2019 after 24 years with the company, half of which she spent in the top job. The 67-year-old has a net worth of $350 million and is ranked 77th on the list.

As CEO, she thwarted a bid to break up PepsiCo, nearly doubled sales and introduced healthier products and environmentally friendly practices. Her fortune stems from stock she was granted while working at PepsiCo.

Nooyi joined the board of Amazon in 2019 and grew up in India. She received an MBA from Yale before becoming one of corporate America's few female CEOs in 2006.

For the sixth time in a row, Daine Hendricks, the co-founder of ABC Supply, topped the list. ABC Supply is one of the largest wholesale distributors of roofing, siding, and windows in the US. Hendricks, 76, has a net worth of USD 15 billion, Forbes said.

In order to compile net worths, Forbes valued individual assets including stakes in public companies using stock prices from May 12, 2023, and valued private companies by consulting with outside experts and conservatively comparing them with public companies.

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