Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (born 23 March 1953) is an Indian billionaire entrepreneur.

She is the executive chairperson and founder of Biocon Limited and Biocon Biologics Limited, a biotechnology company based in Bangalore, India and the former chairperson of Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.

Kiran Mazumdar was born on 23 March 1953 in Bangalore, Karnataka state, to Gujarati parents.

She was educated at Bangalore's Bishop Cotton Girl's High School, graduating in 1968.

She then attended Mount Carmel College, Bangalore, a women's college offering pre-university courses as an affiliate of Bangalore University.

She studied biology and zoology, graduating from Bangalore University with a bachelor's degree in zoology in 1973.

Mazumdar hoped to go to medical school, but was not able to obtain a scholarship.

Her father, Rasendra Mazumdar, was the head brewmaster at United Breweries.

He suggested that she study fermentation science, and train to be a brewmaster, a very non-traditional field for women.

Mazumdar went to Ballarat College, Melbourne University in Australia to study malting and brewing.

In 1974, she was the only woman enrolled in the brewing course and topped in her class.

She earned the degree as master brewer in 1975.

She worked as a trainee brewer in Carlton and United Breweries, Melbourne and as a trainee maltster at Barrett Brothers and Burston, Australia.

She also worked for some time as a technical consultant at Jupiter Breweries Limited, Calcutta and as a technical manager at Standard Maltings Corporation, Baroda between 1975 and 1977.

However, when she investigated the possibility of advancing her career in Bangalore or Delhi, she was told that she could not be hired as a master brewer in India because "It's a man's work."

She began to look abroad for opportunities and was offered a position in Scotland.

Before Mazumdar could move, she met Leslie Auchincloss, the founder of Biocon Biochemicals Limited, of Cork, Ireland.

Auchincloss's company produced enzymes for use in the brewing, food-packaging and textile industries.

Auchincloss was looking for a partner in India to help establish an Indian subsidiary to supply him with Papain.

Mazumdar agreed to undertake the job on the condition that if she did not wish to continue six months later she would be given a brewmaster's position comparable to the one she was giving up.

After a brief period as a trainee manager at Biocon Biochemicals Limited, of Cork, Ireland, to learn more about the business, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw returned to India.

She started Biocon India in 1978 in the garage of her rented house in Bengaluru with a seed capital of Rs.

10,000. Although it was a joint venture, Indian laws restricted foreign ownership to only 30% of the company, which meant that 70% of the company belonged to Kiran Mazumdar Shaw.

Initially, she faced credibility challenges because of her youth, gender and her untested business model.

She was unable to secure funding for her company at the early stages of her business.

A chance meeting with a banker at a social event finally enabled her to get her first financial backing.

She also found it difficult to recruit people to work for her start-up, her first employee was a retired garage mechanic and her first unit was in a nearby 3,000-square-foot shed.

The most complicated piece of equipment in her lab at that time was a spectrophotometer.

Moreover, she faced the technological challenges associated with trying to build a biotech business in a country with poor infrastructure.

Uninterrupted power, good quality water, sterile labs, imported research equipment, and workers with advanced scientific skills were not easily available in India at that period of time.

The company's initial projects were the extraction of papain (an enzyme from papaya used to tenderize meat) and isinglass (obtained from tropical catfish and used to clarify beer).

Within a year of its inception, Biocon India was able to manufacture enzymes and export them to the U.S. and Europe, the first Indian company to do so.

At the end of her first year, Mazumdar used her earnings to buy a 20-acre property with plans to expand in the future.

Mazumdar spearheaded Biocon's evolution from an industrial enzymes manufacturing company to a fully integrated bio-pharmaceutical company with a well-balanced business portfolio of products and a research focus on diabetes, oncology and auto-immune diseases.

She also established two subsidiaries: Syngene (1994) which provides early research and development support services on a contract basis and Clinigene (2000) which focuses on clinical research trials and the development of both generic and new medicines.

She was on the Financial Times 2011 top 50 women in business list.

In 2014, she was awarded the Othmer Gold Medal for outstanding contributions to the progress of science and chemistry.

In 2019, she was listed as the 68th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes.

She was named EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year 2020.

She is married to John Shaw.