Jayshree Ullal, Indra Nooyi on Forbes list of 100 richest self-made women in US

Four Indian-origin women, including Jayshree Ullal and Indra Nooyi, have been named by Forbes among America’s 100 richest self-made women, with a combined net worth of a whopping USD 4.06 billion.

President and CEO of Arista Networks, a computer networking firm, Jayshree Ullal; co-founder of IT consulting and outsourcing firm Synte Neerja Sethi; co-founder and former chief technology officer (CTO) of cloud company Confluent Neha Narkhede; and PepsiCo former chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi made it to the Forbes list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women.

“Bolstered in part by a rebound in the stock market, they are cumulatively worth a record USD 124 billion, up nearly 12 per cent from a year ago,” Forbes said last month at the release of its ninth annual list in New York.

Ullal, ranked 15th on the list, has a net worth of USD 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 US$ 4.4 billion in 2022. She is also on the board of directors of Snowflake, a cloud computing company, which went public in September 2020.

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

Sethi, 68, ranked 25th on the list, has a net worth of USD 990 million. Syntel, co-founded in 1980 by Sethi and her husband Bharat Desai, was bought by French IT firm Atos SE for USD 3.4 billion in October 2018. Sethi got an estimated USD 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.

Narkhede, 38, is ranked 50th on the list with a net worth of USD 520 million.
As a LinkedIn software engineer, she helped develop the open-source messaging system Apache Kafka to handle the networking sites 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 company worth USD 586 million according to 2022 revenues went public in June 2021 at a USD 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.

Nooyi is the former chairperson and CEO of PepsiCo and retired in 2019 after 24 years with the company, half of which she spent in the top job. The 67-year-old Nooyi has a net worth of USD 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 environment-friendly practices.

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Her fortune stems from the stock she was granted while working at PepsiCo. Nooyi also joined the board of Amazon in 2019. She grew up in India, received her MBA degree from Yale before becoming one of corporate America’s few women CEOs in 2006.

For the 6th 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 United States. Hendricks, 76, has a net worth of USD 15 billion, Forbes said.

To compile networths, Forbes valued individual assets, including stakes in public companies using stock prices from May 12, 2023, and valued private companies in consultation with outside experts and conservatively comparing them with public companies.

(With agency inputs)