Shah founded Kinara Capital, a non-banking financial company, in 2011 to drive financial inclusion for small businesses and emerged as the jury favourite because of her ambition to solve a significant problem in the lending space.
ETtech“We liked the ambition from Hardika to solve a large and substantive problem in the lending space. Kinara has the potential to lead the way in creating more entrepreneurial opportunities in the country,” said jury member Albinder Dhindsa, founder and chief executive of Blinkit.
Since inception, Kinara has served more than 82,000 MSMEs in sectors like manufacturing, construction and building materials.
“This recognition represents a growing knowledge of women’s leadership in shaping the future of our economy. It highlights the progress that we have made, but it also puts a spotlight on the journey ahead. While we see more women stepping into entrepreneurial roles, there’s still a lot remaining to be done in terms,” Shah said.
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Drawing from her professional and academic experiences in the impact space, she identified a critical gap in access to capital: the “missing middle” and small businesses needing loans but lacking property collateral.
Bengaluru-based Kinara offers a wide array of collateral-free business loans of between Rs 5,000 and Rs 30 lakh. The company’s loan book grew 26% year on year to Rs 3,172 crore as of July 2024. While it doesn’t require immovable assets as collateral, Kinara hypothecates assets like stocks and machinery, providing some degree of security for loans.
Fiscal 2024, when it posted a net profit of Rs 62 crore, was the NBFC’s ninth consecutive profitable year.
Before founding Kinara Capital, Shah built her career in management consulting, having worked at Accenture for over two decades, and completed a joint executive MBA programme from Columbia Business School and Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.
The firm is particularly committed to supporting female entrepreneurs through its ‘HerVikas’ programme which has been running for the last five years and under which over Rs 1,000 crore in cumulative disbursements will happen within the next year. HerVikas provides female entrepreneurs several benefits to empower them to access formal credit, including a 60-day repayment holiday, upfront discounts on interest rates and processing fees.
With 133 branches and more than 1,600 field employees, the company offers doorstep service and omnichannel customer support in regional languages, ensuring accessibility for MSME entrepreneurs, especially women.
The company, valued at Rs 1,100 crore, has so far raised Rs 625 crore from investors including Nuveen Global Impact Fund, Gaja Capital, British International Investment, Triple Jump, Patamar Capital and GAWA Capital.
“We are one of the few financial services organisations that are led by a women-majority management team,” Shah said. “And as we have achieved gender parity in our workforce, in our headquarters in Bangalore, I look forward to achieving this even with our MSME customers … woman entrepreneurs are underrepresented in every aspect of our ecosystem, and I wish to see this changing, especially for micro MSMEs.”
Shah won among a stellar cast of nominees spanning Prukalpa Sankar (SaaS company Atlan), Romita Mazumdar (D2C skincare brand Foxtale), Ankur Dahiya (rural ecommerce startup Rozana) and Shruti (B2B procurement and distribution platform ApnaKlub).
Other contenders
Ankur Dahiya
ETtech
At Rozana, Dahiya aims to bridge the gap between urban and rural product accessibility. Rozana allows rural consumers to order products via an app or call centre. It buys the products and stores them in leased warehouses.
Romita Mazumdar
ETtech
Foxtale was born out of Mazumdar’s passion for skincare and her keen observation of market gaps. Identifying the need for high-efficacy products, she set out to create a brand that prioritised both quality and affordability.
Prukalpa Sankar
ETtechAtlan enables large enterprise teams to collaborate on data projects. Sankar’s passion for data began during an internship at Goldman Sachs, where she saw data-driven decisions transforming processes.