Five entrepreneurs from Hyderabad have made it to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2020 list. This includes Prem Kumar of Marut Drone, Ashwin Mocherla of The ThickShake Factory, Sandeep Bommi of AdonoMo, Vihari of Urban Kisaan and Pawan Kumar Chandana of Skyroot Aerospace.
In fact, the 2020 list this year is led by India with the highest number of honorees of 69 on this year’s list, followed by China with 41.
Prem Kumar Vislawath, Suraj Peddi, and Sai Kumar Chinthala cofounded Marut Drones, India's first drone technology developed to eradicate mosquito larvae and water hyacinths on lakes. Amid the current pandemic, it has also deployed five drone solutions. This includes disinfectant spraying drone for large area sanitisation, one drone that does movement tracking for crowd control and public health warnings, a thermal analysis drone for identification of human body temperature in crowded places, a medical delivery drone of critical supplies and Eye In The Sky, which is a real-time drone surveillance.
Pawan Chandana's company Skyroot Aerospace is one of the first privately held companies building space rockets in India. It plans to launch its first rocket in 2021 to put commercial satellites into space. Pawan earlier worked as a systems engineer at the government-run Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), cofounded Skyroot with former ISRO colleagues and is the company's CEO.
Sandeep Bommireddi is the cofounder of India-based Adonmo, an adtech startup that helps advertisers target their audience outdoors through digital screens mounted on top of taxis that display ads based on time and location.
Ashwin Mocherla and his brother cofounded the ThickShake Factory, a specialty milkshake retailer, with the aim to popularise the concept of milkshakes in the country. Since its launch in 2013, the ThickShake Factory has 125 outlets across in India.
Vihari Kanukollu cofounded UrbanKisaan in 2017 which builds indoor vertical farms to grow pesticide-free produce that are later sold to retail consumers on a subscription and walk-in basis. The plants are grown in a vertical hydroponic environment without soil and with the use of mineral nutrient solutions in water. UrbanKisaan produce uses 95% less water while its crops get 30 times more yield as compared to traditional farming. In March, UrbanKisaan was selected for Y Combinator's winter 2020 batch.
Apart from these, the list of Forbes 30 under 30 Asia also includes Ashish Gupta, founder of DiscoverAI; Karmesh Gupta, co-founder of WiJungle; Udayan Banerjee and Aayush jha, founders of Clairco, the founding team of GoComet; Aditya Prasad, Harsh Pokharna and Gaurav Kumar, co-founders of OkCredit; Lal Chand Bisu, Vinod Meena and Vikas Goyal, cofounders of Kuku FM; Jonna Venkata Karthik Raja, co-founder of Paperboy which is a digital news aggregator; Rishabh Karwa and Nitin Rana cofounders of GoMechanic, among others.
Find the entire list here.