Sairee Chahal
Delhi
Launched an app that has become one of the largest women-only social community platforms in South Asia
If Sairee Chahal had followed the path she had planned for herself, she'd have been an academician. A student of JNU with a Masters in Russian linguistics and an MPhil in international relations, her life mostly revolved around the campus, until she stumbled upon the Internet. "I met this person who wanted me to build a media product company [for the web] from scratch," she recalls. This was in the late 90s, when the possibilities of the World Wide Web were fairly unknown.

In the later years, when she worked in the corporate space, Chahal witnessed sexism that women were being subjected to. Also, having grown up in a middle-class family in the small town of Muzaffarpur, she felt that the "narrative of women" had been conveniently sidelined. It's then, for the first time, that she decided to use the Internet as a platform to make the office environment more accommodating and inclusive for women. "I always wanted to build something for women, which wasn't selling shoes or clothes to them," she says. She began in 2011 with the launch of Fleximoms, a solutions provider for women - especially mothers - wanting to enter and re-enter the workplace.