Four Indian-origin women named among top female US tech moguls by Forbes

An American business magazine Forbes has released names of America’s top 50 influential women in the technology sector, including four-Indian origin female tech moguls in this year’s list.

Padmasree Warrior, former chief technology officer (CTO) of Cisco; Komal Mangtani, senior director at app-based cab aggregator Uber; Neha Narkhede, chief technology officer and co-founder of streaming platform Confluent; and Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, CEO and founder of identity-management company Drawbrige, are among the Forbes’ 2018 list.

“Women don’t wait for the future. The 2018 Inaugural Top 50 Women in Technology list identifies three generations of forward-thinking technologists leading more than a dozen tech sectors across the globe,” Forbes said in its ‘America’s Top 50 Women in Tech 2018’.

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The 58-year-old Warrior, according to Forbes, served in the executive position at both Motorola and Cisco and currently the US CEO of the Chinese electric-autonomous-vehicle startup NIO.

“Warrior still finds the time to mentor other women in the tech industry, stay in touch with her 1.6 million Twitter followers and follow a nightly meditation routine,” the business magazine said.

Mangtani, who heads business intelligence at Uber, also serves on the board of non-profit organisation ‘Women Who Code’. Mangtani, an alumnus of Gujarat’s Dharmsinh Desai Institute of Technology, led Uber’s $1.2-billion donation and partnership with Girls Who Code to increase access to computer science, it said.

Narkhede, 32, who studied at Pune University, had as a software engineer at LinkedIn helped develop Apache Kafka—which can process the huge influx of data coming from the site in real time. The data-processing software has become the heart of Confluent, an enterprise Narkhede founded with her LinkedIn co-workers to build tools for companies using Apache Kafka, Forbes said.

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Meanwhile, forty-three-year-old Sivaramakrishnan’s company, Drawbridge, uses large-scale artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify the different devices people.

“As the number of devices people use on a daily basis—computers, laptops and smartphones—increase, advertisers need a way to show ads to a person across all their devices. Facebook and Google already offer these services to advertisers, but now they have a competitor with Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan’s Drawbridge,” said Forbes.

Tech heavyweights IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and Netflix executive Anne Aaron were also among the Forbes’ list.

According to Forbes, a pool of more than 300 candidates in areas working in Artificial Intelligence (AI), consumer and enterprise technology, biotech, video games and the US government were identified for America’s top 50 women in tech.

These are the women who have mad STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills and are shaping the world of tech, Forbes said.

(With PTI inputs)