Meet woman who worked in Ratan Tata's company, started firm from her flat, has Rs 8395 crore net worth, she is...

Several women in the business world are successfully running their companies. Some even began their entrepreneurship journey from scratch while others worked in top firms before starting their firms. Many of them are now billionaires. One such person is Neerja Sethi, who co-founded the US IT consulting and outsourcing firm Syntel.

Sethi is an Indian-origin woman who used to work in the IT firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) before starting her company from flat with her husband. The 69-year-old is now a billionaire with a real-time net worth of USD 1 billion (Rs 8395 crore), as per Forbes. She holds an undergraduate degree in mathematics and an MBA in operations research from Delhi University. She also completed a master's degree in computer science from Oakland University.

She is married to Bharat Desai and has two children. The duo met in the US while working for TCS. Sethi with her husband started Syntel in 1980 in their apartment in Troy, Michigan (US) with just USD 2000 investment. This is around Rs 1.6 lakh today. However, in 2018, French IT firm Atos SE bought Syntel for USD 3.4 billion.

Sethi got an estimated USD 510 million for her stake. She had served as an executive at Syntel since 1980 and did not join Atos after the acquisition. Neerja now resides in Fisher Island, Florida. She has been on Forbes' America’s richest self-made women list several times including in 2023.

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