Indian Women Entrepreneurs Shine: Cartier Presents Prestigious Award
This esteemed award for entrepreneurship goes to female innovators who address the most important global issues.
Three Indian women have been awarded the 2024 Cartier Women’s Initiative Fellowship. This prestigious entrepreneurship award is given to female change-makers solving the world’s most pressing challenges.
33 leading entrepreneurs from every corner of the globe are represented in the awards —
Mansi Jain from Delhi is the founder of DigitalPaani, a software platform that enables wastewater treatment plants to manage their entire operations so they can treat, recover, and reuse contaminated water effectively.
DigitalPaani helps treat 90 million litres of water a day, has transformed the water infrastructure in nearly 50 units of India's top companies into high quality and compliant facilities, won awards by Niti Aayog and FICCI, and received investments from leading investors globally. and this year three of them are from India.
Akshita Sachdeva, from Bangalore, founded Trestle Labs to promote inclusive education and employment for individuals with blindness using their AI-powered technology, Kibo. Kibo digitizes, translates, and converts printed, handwritten, and digital content into audio in 60 languages. Since July 2019, Kibo has made over 650 institutions inclusive and empowered more than 150,000 individuals in 25 countries. Trestle Labs has been featured on Shark Tank India Season 3 and has received numerous national and international awards for their efforts towards making content accessible for all.
Ira Guha from Bangalore is the founder of Asan. She designed and patented an innovative menstrual cup at the Harvard Innovation Lab to address period poverty and reduce waste pollution from plastic sanitary pads.
Asan has saved millions of dollars for rural households through their social impact programs and has averted more than 100,000 tonnes of landfill waste. Along with the Cartier Fellowship, they recently won an award from the UK government to develop an innovative period tracker app.
The fellowship includes generous financial support from Cartier Women’s Initiative, an in person social entrepreneurship program with INSEAD business school, and a human capital support to super-charge the growth of these three businesses.The awards ceremony was viewed by over 14 million people globally, with keynote speakers including supermodel Karlie Kloss, Cartier CEO Cyril Vigneron, Olympic diver Guo Ginjing and writer and comedian Sandi Toksvig.
