India’s Changemakers of 2025: Leaders Building the Next Economic Engine

India’s economic momentum in 2025 is being driven not just by scale or capital, but by founders who are quietly rebuilding the systems that power business, work, consumption, and capability. Across consulting, FMCG, wellness, education, and talent ecosystems, a new generation of entrepreneurs is responding to structural gaps that traditional models have struggled to address.

These leaders are not chasing attention. They are focused on execution—building platforms and organisations that solve real problems at scale, while aligning with how India’s economy, workforce, and consumers are evolving.

From the way companies access senior expertise to how food is manufactured, wellness is consumed, skills are learned, and workplaces are shaped, the following changemakers represent different facets of India’s next economic engine.

1) Ravi Somani, Founder, Qoot Food

Industry: FMCG, Healthy Snacking & Food Manufacturing

Ravi Somani is building a modern Indian snacking ecosystem that combines nutrition, taste, and manufacturing credibility, three factors that rarely coexist at scale. As Founder of Qoot Food, he has approached healthy snacking not as a trend, but as a manufacturing and product innovation challenge.

Qoot’s positioning stands on two pillars: a consumer-facing range of clean-label snacks and functional foods, and a strong B2B contract manufacturing capability that supports national brands. This includes Quipps, Qoot’s clean-label snack brand, developed with a focus on ingredient transparency and simpler formulations. Together, these pillars create a balanced structure in an FMCG market where trust, safety, and consistency often determine whether a product becomes a household habit or fades after early adoption. This dual structure is strategically important in Indian FMCG, where trust and quality consistency often determine whether a product becomes a household habit or disappears after early adoption.

Somani’s leadership is notable for its emphasis on structured manufacturing discipline, food safety certifications, scalable facility capabilities, and a pipeline of innovation that continues to introduce newer formats aligned with changing health expectations. Rather than relying on marketing-led differentiation, Qoot’s credibility is built through product engineering, formulation capability, and delivery consistency.

In a market where consumers increasingly want “better-for-you” foods but still refuse to compromise on taste, Qoot’s work sits at the intersection of tradition and modern nutrition. Somani is positioning the brand as not just a product company, but a backbone manufacturer and innovation partner in India’s evolving healthy snacking landscape.

2) Akshi Khandelwal, Co-founder & CEO, Butterfly Ayurveda | Café Swasthya

Industry: Ayurveda, Wellness & Functional Foods

Akshi Khandelwal is modernising Ayurveda in a way that makes it usable in everyday life—not as a niche wellness category, but as an integrated lifestyle system. As Co-founder and CEO of Butterfly Ayurveda & Café Swasthya, she has built a research-led wellness brand grounded in traditional principles, but executed through contemporary manufacturing, formulation science, and consumer usability.

Her work moves beyond product creation into capability-building. Under her leadership, Butterfly Ayurveda established an AYUSH GMP-certified manufacturing facility supported by FSSAI compliance—strengthening quality assurance and in-house production. The brand’s innovation engine has produced 50+ in-house formulations across teas, herbal powders, functional foods, and wellness products, reflecting serious R&D intent rather than trend-driven launches.

The launch of Café Swasthya shows a second, equally strategic insight: wellness adoption increases when it is made experiential and familiar. By translating Ayurveda into an accessible café format, Akshi is building a lifestyle extension that makes wellness part of daily consumption rather than an occasional corrective behaviour. The growing traction indicates the concept’s scalability into other locations—turning Ayurveda from “product consumption” into “lifestyle transformation.”

In 2025, as consumers increasingly demand clean living and preventive wellness, Akshi Khandelwal is positioning Butterfly Ayurveda & Café Swasthya as a bridge between tradition, science, and modern behaviour.

3) Abhineet Sharma, Founder & Director, RoboSpecies Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Industry: Robotics, AI, STEM & Applied Learning

Abhineet Sharma is contributing to a critical national priority: building India’s next generation of technology talent. As Founder and Director of RoboSpecies Technologies, he has focused on closing the gap between academic learning and real-world application, especially in robotics, AI, coding, and STEM.

What makes RoboSpecies relevant is its focus on experiential learning. Instead of relying only on theory-driven education, Sharma’s approach enables students to learn by building, through DIY kits, structured workshops, and modular curriculum frameworks that can be deployed across schools and colleges. This model is essential in a world where employability and innovation increasingly depend on problem-solving, prototyping, and applied engineering thinking.

Through initiatives like RobotriX and TinkerBrix, RoboSpecies has created hands-on pathways into robotics, AI, IoT, and STEM, making technical learning more accessible and less intimidating for young learners. In India’s education ecosystem, where exposure often depends on geography and institution quality, such models have the potential to create broader, more equitable access to applied tech skills.

In the long run, Sharma’s work is less about kits and more about capability: creating a generation that can build, test, and innovate. In 2025, that’s not just education, it’s economic infrastructure.

4) Anuj Agrawal, Founder & CEO, Zyoin Group | Workplace Awards

Industry: Talent Advisory, Recruitment & Workplace Transformation

Anuj Agrawal sits at the centre of a modern business reality: companies can’t scale without the right talent systems, and they can’t retain talent without the right workplace culture. Through Zyoin Group and Workplace Awards, Agrawal is building both sides of the equation.

Zyoin Group has grown into a trusted talent advisory partner for high-growth startups, GCCs, and global enterprises, supporting hiring across technology, product, and leadership functions. But the bigger insight in Agrawal’s work is the recognition that hiring is only one layer; culture, inclusion, and recognition determine whether talent actually thrives.

That led to Workplace Awards, an ecosystem designed to celebrate and shape workplace excellence, especially within the GCC landscape. In 2025, as the future of work becomes more distributed and expectation-driven, platforms that validate and reinforce workplace leadership become strategic assets for employers.

By connecting recruitment outcomes with workplace excellence, Agrawal’s work is redesigning how organisations build teams, not only to hire faster, but to build sustainable environments where talent stays and performs.

5) Deepak Malkani & Shanu Malkani, Co-founders, IndusGuru Network Partners LLP

Industry: Consulting, Expert Talent Platforms & Future of Work

Deepak and Shanu Malkani are building the infrastructure of expertise—solving a problem that most businesses feel but rarely fix: accessing senior talent quickly, precisely, and without traditional consulting overhead.

When curated expert marketplaces were not mainstream in India, Deepak & Shanu built IndusGuru with a strong emphasis on trust, vetting, and fit. Their thesis was straightforward: organisations don’t always need large consulting teams; they often need the right senior expert—fast—who can solve a specific business challenge with clarity and accountability.

IndusGuru’s model supports advisory roles, short-term project engagements, and fractional leadership requirements across strategy, finance, HR, marketing, operations, and technology. What makes the platform valuable is not only the supply of experts but the discipline of matching: a rigorous framework that enables organisations to engage best-fit consultants within days.

At a macro level, IndusGuru reflects a structural shift in the world of work. Companies increasingly want outcome-driven expertise without fixed staffing burdens, and senior professionals increasingly want independent, meaningful work beyond full-time roles. By building a credible bridge between these two sides, the Malkanis have contributed to the maturation of India’s expert gig economy—moving it from informal freelancing to structured, senior-level engagements.

In 2025, as organisations demand speed, specialisation, and flexibility, IndusGuru represents a future-of-work model that is becoming less optional and more inevitable.

6) Vatsal Kundalia, Managing Director , Advait Greenergy Pvt Ltd

Industry: Green Energy

Vatsal Kundalia, Managing Director at Advait Greenergy Private Limited (AGPL), represents a new generation of execution-led leadership shaping India’s energy transition. At a time when clean energy growth requires not just ambition but operational depth, his approach centers on building platforms that deliver measurable, on-ground outcomes. A key strategic focus for AGPL is Battery Energy Storage Systems, with the company setting up a large-scale BESS manufacturing facility planned at 2.5 GW capacity. This manufacturing push is aligned with AGPL’s active execution role in storage projects, including work on Gujarat’s first 100 MW+ BESS capacity as a developer, supported by a growing project pipeline. AGPL’s storage capabilities span system design, integration, grid compliance, safety, and performance assurance, ensuring solutions that are technically robust and operationally resilient.

In parallel, AGPL is strengthening its position across Green Hydrogen and utility-scale solar EPC. The company is set to inaugurate a 30 MW green hydrogen electrolyser assembly line, while already executing hydrogen projects that build expertise in engineering, integration, and deployment. AGPL has also delivered over 250 MW of utility-scale solar projects within its first year of operations, including installations in some of Asia’s most challenging terrains, reflecting strong execution discipline. Central to Vatsal Kundalia’s leadership philosophy is long-term capability building through strong teams, technical ownership, and scalable yet practical processes. Known for a methodical, hands-on style, he combines ambition with operational rigor, focusing on sustainable growth over short-term wins and positioning AGPL as a credible, future-ready contributor to India’s evolving clean-energy landscape.

Conclusion

What unites these changemakers is not the industries they operate in, but the systems they are rebuilding. Whether it is how expertise is accessed, food is manufactured, wellness is consumed, skills are developed, or workplaces are shaped, each is contributing to the structural evolution of India’s economy.

India’s Changemakers of 2025 are not focused on short-term visibility. They are focused on building the next economic engine—quietly, deliberately, and with long-term impact.