Reliance Jio Board Directors Isha Ambani and Akash Ambani, Serum Institute of India CEO Adar Poonawalla and Byju Raveendran, co-founder of India's leading education technology company Byju's, are among the "emerging leaders" from across the world named by Fortune in its annual list of influential people under the age of 40.
A fragment from the Fortune Magazine article read, "Reliance is a family business. Akash joined the company in 2014 after receiving an economics degree from Brown University. Isha joined a year later, following stints at Yale, Stanford, and McKinsey. As Jio board members, they helped seal the company's recent megadeal with Facebook--USD 5.7 billion for a 9.99 per cent stake--plus major follow-on investments from marquee tech titans like Google, Qualcomm, and Intel. The flurry of investments lent the business an eye-popping USD 65 billion private valuation."
The 2020 Fortune 40 Under 40 list highlights 40 influential people each in five categories of finance, technology, healthcare, government and politics, and media and entertainment from around the world.
The list names Raveendran, the 39-year-old CEO of Byju's, India's "biggest education technology company." Byju recently took over White Hat Jr. business which is online coding platform for USD 300 million.
"Raveendran has shown the world that it really is possible to build a massively successful online education company," Fortune said, adding that the company is helping "millions of students prep and study for the most important exams of their lives" while also teaching them about core topics like mathematics and science.
On Poonawalla, Fortune said "few people on the planet are more in demand right now than Poonawalla," the CEO of his family-owned company, the world's largest manufacturer of vaccines.
The list also includes SoftBank Group Senior vice president, investments Akshay Naheta (39), Head of digital assets and distributed ledger technology (DLT) at TD Ameritrade Sunayna Tuteja, Global vice president Xiaomi and managing director, Xiaomi India Manu Kumar Jain (39), Maverick Ventures Managing director Ambar Bhattacharyya (37), PharmEasy Cofounders Dhaval Shah and Dharmil Sheth (31) and ACLU Chief product and digital officer Deepa Subramaniam (39).
Fortune said that under Jain, Xiaomi overtook Korean giant Samsung to become the smartphone leader in India in just three years, bolstered by a strategy to act more like an Indian company.