Radhika Gupta likes to introduce herself by her rejections. Born with a condition that affected her neck, bullied as a child, turned down by seven employers early in her career — it is not the résumé you expect from someone who now leads one of India's well-known mutual fund houses.

That is exactly the point. As chief executive of Edelweiss Mutual Fund, and later as a judge on India's version of Shark Tank, she became a rare thing in Indian finance: a leader who talks openly about failure, self-doubt and belonging, in an industry that usually prizes a poker face.

She calls herself the girl with the broken neck who was rejected seven times. Then she ran the whole firm.

Her rise matters beyond the numbers. In a field where women remain scarce at the top, she has become a role model precisely because she refuses to hide the hard parts — the anxiety, the imposter feeling, the years of being underestimated.

On LinkedIn she writes the way she speaks: direct, warm, a little defiant. Her message to anyone who has ever been told they don't fit is simple and stubborn — the rejections are not the end of your story. Sometimes they are the beginning of it.

Gupta's father was a diplomat, and she grew up in several countries, including Pakistan, the United States and Nigeria. She took a dual degree at the University of Pennsylvania, combining engineering with the Wharton School's business programme, and worked at McKinsey and the quantitative investment firm AQR Capital before returning to India.

In 2009 she co-founded Forefront Capital Management, an alternative investment firm, with her husband, Nalin Moniz, and a friend. Edelweiss acquired it in 2014, and in 2017 she became managing director and chief executive of Edelweiss Asset Management, one of the youngest people and one of very few women to run an Indian fund house. Under her the firm became known for passive products such as the Bharat Bond exchange-traded fund, launched in 2019 to give retail investors access to public-sector bonds.

She joined Shark Tank India as an investor in its third season in 2024, and her book Limitless, published in 2023, sets out her argument that ambition and self-belief can be learned. A TEDx talk about growing up as 'the girl with the broken neck' is the clearest statement of the message she has built her public profile on.