Ajaita Shah is an award-winning entrepreneur with over 18 years of experience working in microfinance, rural commerce, climate, and rural marketing in India. She’s won many accolades including Fortune 40 Under 40 Entrepreneur of the Year (2022), Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur of the Year, Women Transforms India Award, Digital Women of the Year, CNBC’s Women Entrepreneur of the Year, Loreal Women of Worth and more. She is a Women’s Changemaker Fellow at Womanity Foundation, Dasra Leadership Fellow, Echoing Green Fellow, and Cordes Fellow. She has spoken in many forums including COP 23, UN High Level Political Forums, UN SDG Summit, and more on social enterprise perspective from the field, to digital inclusion, to climate change to gender smart investing.
Ajaita drives vision, strategy, investments, and partnerships for the social enterprise. At Frontier Markets, she has raised $8MN of blended capital with leading investors like TPG Rise Fund, Acumen Fund, Engie, FMO, Doen Foundation, Good Energies, and Seed fund. Ajaita has been working in social enterprises and rural India for 18+ years, and has committed to empowering rural women across the developing world through business models, clean energy, technology, data, and inspiring women to push themselves beyond their societal boundaries.
Frontier Markets has been the first deep rural amazon of India – as a last mile marketing and commerce platform that uses data to employ women entrepreneur field agents to connect rural households with high quality, climate friendly, and gender inclusive solutions with 30,000 rural women entrepreneurs who have helped 500,000 households adopt 15+ million high impact solutions in India through technology impacting 3.5million people. Ajaita serves on the board of Frontier Innovations Foundation, a non-profit focused on global last-mile distribution support for companies. She also serves on the board of SHINE Invest which focuses on Divest-Invest, and Climate Change.