Falguni Sanjay Nayar, born on 19 February 1963, is the founder and chief executive of the beauty and lifestyle retailer Nykaa, formally known as FSN E-Commerce Ventures, a name taken from her own initials. She is one of two self-made female billionaires in India, the other being Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw. In Forbes’ list of India’s 100 richest tycoons dated 9 October 2024, Nayar and her family ranked 71st, with a net worth of $4.2 billion.
She was born and raised in a Gujarati family in Mumbai. Her father was a businessman who ran a small bearings company, and her mother helped him. She graduated in commerce from Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics in Mumbai and earned a postgraduate management degree from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad in 1985. She started her career as a consultant at A. F. Ferguson & Co.
In 1993 Nayar left consulting and joined the Kotak Mahindra Group, where she led the mergers and acquisitions team and later opened the group’s institutional equities offices in London and New York. She returned to India in 2001. In 2005 she became managing director of Kotak Mahindra Capital, the investment banking unit, and a director of Kotak Securities, the institutional equities arm. She spent about 18 years at Kotak in total, as other profiles of her career note, and she left in 2012.
In April 2012, at the age of 50, she founded Nykaa with $2 million of her own money. The name comes from the Sanskrit word “Nayaka”, meaning an actress or someone in the spotlight, and the company went on to become India’s largest online seller of cosmetics, competing with global e-commerce players. Her decision to start a company after a long banking career is often cited as an example of late-career entrepreneurship.
Nykaa’s market debut was a landmark. The company was valued at $2.3 billion in 2021, a valuation that took Nayar’s net worth to an estimated $1.1 billion, and it listed on 10 November 2021 at a valuation of $13 billion. Soon after the listing Nayar became the wealthiest self-made Indian woman, with a net worth that rose to $6.5 billion, according to Wikipedia. In 2022 she made her debut in the Forbes India Rich List at rank 44, and in 2021 she received the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award for India.
She married Sanjay Nayar in 1987; they met at business school. He is the chief executive of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts India. They have two children, the twins Adwaita and Anchit. Adwaita is the chief executive of Nykaa Fashion, and Anchit heads the retail and e-commerce divisions of the group, which makes Nykaa one of India’s better-known family-led listed companies.
Her net worth figures differ between sources and over time, because they depend on Nykaa’s share price: the $6.5 billion mentioned soon after the listing and the $4.2 billion in Forbes’ October 2024 list are both reported, and IndiaX24 treats them as snapshots, not current values. Her career, from investment banking in London and New York to a Mumbai start-up, is the main reason she is regarded as one of India’s most influential businesswomen.
Featured image: The entrance of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (file photo, 2012; Falguni Nayar graduated from the institute in 1985, and this is not a photo of her). Photo by Maulik Kansara, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
