DMart’s Radhakishan Damani is India’s richest self-made entrepreneur

Radhakishan Damani, the founder of the hugely popular DMart chain of hypermarkets, has topped a latest rich list of the country’s self-made entrepreneurs—a unique distinction considering the list is dominated by much younger founders of start-ups like Paytm, Zomato, Cred, Zerodha, Swiggy, Flipkart and Razorpay.

Damani occupies the top slot in the ‘IDFC FIRST Private Hurun India Top 200 Self-Made Entrepreneurs of the Millennium 2023’ with his company, Avenue Supermarts, boasting of a market capitalisation of Rs 2,38,188 crore.

Damani, a stock market veteran investor as well, is followed by the Bansals—Binny and Sachin—of Flipkart (Rs 1,19,472 crore), Zomato’s Deepinder Goyal (Rs 86,835 crore), Bhavit Sheth & Harsh Jain of Dream11 (Rs 66,542 crore), and Swiggy (Rs 66,542 crore).

Further, Razorpay’s Harshil Mathur & Shashank Kumar, Abhay Soi of Max Healthcare Institute, Paytm's Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Cred's Kunal Shah and Zerodha's Nithin Kamath & Nikhil Kamath also fetire in the top 10 list of the study.

Interestingly, Damani, 68, is not the oldest on the list as rich entrepreneurs like Ashok Soota (80) of Happiest Minds, Naresh Trehan (77) of Medanta, Aether’s Ashwin Desai (72) and Jaithirth Rao (71) of Homefirst among others feature on the list.

On the other hand, the youngest on the rich list is Zepto's Kaivalya Vohra, who is 21. He is followed by BharatPe's Shashvat Nakrani (25), Dilsher Malhi (27) & Siddhant Saurabh (28) of Zupee, and Ritesh Agarwal (29) of OYO.

The list of youngest women in the list is led by Ghazal Alagh (35) of mamaearth; Saumya Singh Rathore (35) of Winzo and Garima Sawhney (37) of Pristyn Care complete the top three slots.

While the list is dominated by start-ups - mostly unlisted ventures -- there are a few well-known listed firms too, with DMart, Zomato, Max Healthcare, Paytm, Nykaa, MakeMyTrip, Star Health Insurance, Policybazaar, Vedant Fashions and Delivery among others featuring in the study.

In terms of cities, Bengaluru, which is often referred to as the start-up capital of India, has the highest representation with 69 companies, followed by Mumbai (41), Gurugram (26), New Delhi (18) and Chennai (11).