Meet Ameera Shah, doctor's daughter who built Rs 6478 crore firm from dad's single clinic

Ameera Shah is the promoter and managing director of Metropolis Healthcare Limited, a company that runs a chain of diagnostic centres. Her father is a pathologist -- Dr Sushil Shah. Her mother is Dr Duru Shah, a gynecologist. She herself is a foreign-educated finance professional who had been working for Goldman Sachs when she decided to turn an entrepreneur. She combined her business knowledge with her father's medical proficiency and created a diagnostic behemoth whose market cap is  a whopping Rs 6478 crore.

Ameera Shah graduated from Mumbai's HR College of Commerce and Economics. She then went abroad to study further. She received a finance degree from the University of Texas, Austin. She belongs to a family of doctors. Her sister is a geneticist. After she successfully launched her company, she did the Owner-President Management Program from Harvard Business School.

Ameera Shah said in an old interview that even though she was working for Goldman Sachs, she never enjoyed her job. She didn't even like the financial services space. She then quit her job and started working on her startup with just five people. She was just 21 when she started working on her startup. She came to India on her father's advice as she wanted to create an impact with her work.

When she came back, she found out that her father's lab had several problems. There were no computers, emails or systems. It was a massive operation in South Mumbai. Her father wanted to create a diagnostics chain, but there was no vision. She then set about realising her father's dream.

Ameera Shah started with modernising operations. She brought in new talent, created fresh departments to handle the operations in a seamless manner, created processes and procedures for smooth functioning of the lab, Your Story reported.

Her father supported her. She became a CEO of sorts for her company. She adopted a bottom to top approach. She started facing patients on the customer care counter. She also started to solve day-to-day problems. She also changed the name of the company from Dr Sushil Shah's Laboratory to Metropolis. They started to partner with other laboratories. The first tie up was in Chennai, with a pathologist named Dr Srinivasan.

The company soon started to grow. In the year 2006, they secured their first external funding. They invested the money they earned from the business, into the business. In 2002, they had only one lab whose revenue was Rs 7 crore. In 2023, their revenue was Rs 1148 crore. In the March quarter alone, their net profit was Rs 33 crore. Today, the company has 1500 plus collection centres and over 125 laboratories. They operate in seven countries.

In 2015, she was honoured by the World Economic Forum. She also featured on the Forbes list of India's Tycoons.