Indian Women Entrepreneurs Shine: Cartier Presents Prestigious Award

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.