Ramaswamy is worth half a billion dollars through “astute investingâ€.
By Raif Karerat
Two Indian American businessmen have been ranked by Forbes magazine among the richest entrepreneurs in the United States under the age of 40.
Vivek Ramaswamy, 30, a former hedge fund manager, is listed at no. 33 on the list with a net worth of $500 million. According to Forbes, the source of his half-billion dollar fortune has been astute investing.
Ramaswamy is the founder of Roivant Sciences, a holding company that aims to buy the world’s forgotten and abandoned drugs from big pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies and develop them through subsidiaries.
At no. 40 is 29-year-old Apoorva Mehta, founder and chief executive of Instacart, the web-based grocery delivery service. Forbes reported the Indian-origin entrepreneur is worth $400 million.
Born in India, Mehta and his family moved to Canada in 2000, where he studied engineering at the University of Waterloo before working at Blackberry, Qualcomm, and then Amazon, all by age 26.
In 2012, he cofounded Instacart, and started by initially making deliveries himself, reported Forbes. Three years later, the company raised $220 million at a $2 billion valuation.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg sits atop the list of wealthiest entrepreneurs under 40 with a net valuation of $47.1 billion.
Forbes said California-based techies have dominated the first-ever list of the nation’s 40 most successful young entrepreneurs under the age of 40, “reaffirming the American Dream and proving yet again that there is no better way right now to get rich fast than to go west and convince venture investors to back your most ambitious ideas.”