From Kamath brothers to Falguni Nayar: The top earning startup founders in 2023

With the recent boom of startup companies and their market values, their top management and founders have been taking home hefty annual salary packages. As 2023 comes to an end, companies have released their financial reports, revealing the salaries of their founders.

The top spot in which startup founder has the highest salary has been reserved by the founders of Zerodha – Nithin Kamath and Nikhil Kamath, who collectively took home an annual salary of nearly ₹200 crore.

While the Kamath brothers themselves took home ₹72 crores each as salary, Zerodha CEO Nithin Kamath’s wife and firm’s director Seema Patil’s annual salary package was ₹36 crore, as per the company’s filings.

Oyo founder Ritesh Agarwal was the second name on the list, while his salary was significantly lower than that of the Kamath brothers, at ₹12 crores annually. Nykaa founder Falguni Nayar, who was once the richest woman in India, took home an annual salary of less than ₹2 crore this year.

Top earning startup founders of 2023

Nikhil and Nithin Kamath (Zerodha) – ₹72 crore each

Ritesh Agarwal (Oyo) – ₹12 crore

Deepak Singh Ahlawat (GamesKraft) – ₹10.1 crore

Manish Taneja and Rahul Dash (Purplle) – ₹6.75 crore each

Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Paytm) – ₹4 crore

Sahil Barua and Kapil Bharati (RateGain) – ₹3.1 crore each

Gaurav Singh Kushwaha (BlueStone) – ₹3 crore

Mithun Sacheti (CaratLane) – ₹2.62 crore

Aman Gupta and Sameer Mehta (boAT) – ₹2.5 crore each

(Salary data from company filings, Inc42 salary tracker)

Other companies which heftily pay their founders and CEOs are HealthifyMe, Lenskart, Noise and MamaEarth. The founders of the 42 new-age startup companies in India took home a total salary of ₹228 crore combined, as reported by Inc42.

The report also stated that Indian startups have laid off more than 29,000 employees in this financial year, despite many of the companies picking up major funding from billionaires and investors.