Meet Nirmit Parikh, CEO of Rs 9,000 crore company, achieved $1 billion valuation in just 21 months

Nirmit Parikh had a high-paying job at the world’s biggest company. But he decided to leave it and return to India to build a unicorn in record time. Nirmit Parikh is the founder and CEO of Apna, the blue-collared jobs platform that became India’s youngest billion-dollar startup amid Covid-19. 

Nirmit was working with Apple at its Cupertino HQ in the US when he decided to build a portal for employment in the unorganised blue-collared sector. Realising a potential business idea, he returned to his homeland just before Covid-19 pandemic hit. To understand the intricacies of the blue-collar job environment, he also went undercover as a factory worker to understand their lives. 

In just 21 months, took Apna to a $1.1 billion valuation (over Rs 9000 crore as of May 2023) with a vision to bring about a “radical cultural and social change” through “ubiquitous technology”. His business idea grew rapidly at 125 percent within 2 years. It is used by over 1.5 lakh firms in India including the likes of Shadowfax, Zomato, Delhivery, G4S Global and Burger King. 

Apna has enabled over 10 crore interviews and its Android app has over 1 crore downloads. In 2021, it achieved a valuation of $1.1 billion with a $100 million Series C round funding led by Tiger Global. While Apna became a quick success story, Nimrit has been an entrepreneur before. 

His first venture was at the age of 21 in 2009 when he founded Incone Technologies, a firm working on flood management. Parikh was invited to the World Economic Forum as a Global Shaper. In his next venture, he built Cruxbox, later selling it to Intel where he became the director of data analytics and reached the mecca of startups, Silicon Valley. Nirmit is an engineer from the Nirma Institute of Technology and an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School for Business in the US.