MD and CEO, Edelweiss Mutual Fund; Co-founder, Forefront Capital | Founded 2009 | Mumbai
A diplomat’s daughter with a tilted neck
Radhika Gupta was born in Pakistan, where her father, an Indian Foreign Service officer, was posted. A complication at birth left her neck with a permanent tilt. The Pennsylvania Gazette reports that it came from the way a nurse positioned her in the incubator.
Her father’s postings moved the family every few years. Bloomberg reported that she attended an international school in Nigeria. By the time she applied to university she had lived on five continents and was living in Rome, according to the Gazette. Her parents were what the Gazette called “service class”: a stable income, but little to spare.
For years she was self-conscious about the tilt. Later she told Bloomberg it had become “a good story to tell.”
Wharton, and seven rejections
Gupta got into the University of Pennsylvania’s Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology and graduated in 2005 with degrees from both the engineering school and Wharton, summa cum laude. In her second year she founded the Women in Computer Science club. Bloomberg reported that she also started an Indian takeaway for fellow students. It was a small, early sign of the founder she would become.
The grades did not translate into a job. Seven consulting firms turned her down during campus recruitment. The Better India reports that after the seventh rejection she sat in her dorm room and thought about ending her life. A friend called for help, and the university stepped in.
The next interview went differently. A McKinsey partner turned out to be a serious bridge player, and the two bonded over the game. She got the offer. After about a year and a half at McKinsey she moved to AQR Capital Management in Greenwich, Connecticut. The Gazette reports that by her mid-twenties she was helping manage around $20 billion in investments.
AQR was a quantitative investment firm. The Gazette notes that she was there through the financial crisis, when markets fell hard and investors pulled money from funds around the world. She had a front-row seat to how investment firms are run, and how they behave under pressure. It was that experience she took with her when she decided to build one of her own.
2009: a hedge fund in a country she barely knew
In the summer of 2009, at 25, she left the US for India. She was not really returning home, because she had never really lived in India. Blume Ventures notes this in its 2023 profile of her.
With her husband Nalin Moniz, a fellow Penn graduate, and Anant Jatia, a colleague from AQR, she set up Forefront Capital Management in Mumbai. The timing was bold, in the middle of the global recession. “We started Forefront Capital with no background and a capital of Rs 25 lakh,” she told The Better India. Speaking to Blume, she described the first money as “25 lakhs raised, as I said, from friends, family, and fools.” The Gazette adds that she and Moniz put in their life savings.
Forefront focused on alternative investments. It set up the country’s first domestic-registered hedge fund under SEBI’s then-new Category III Alternative Investment Fund rules. Because the rules were so new, the founders were shaping them as they went. “We helped co-construct the regulations around leverage and what the circular would be,” she told Blume.
Building Forefront, then selling it
The firm grew quickly. The Better India reports that it reached about ₹2 crore in its first year, roughly eight times the starting capital. By 2014 it was managing around ₹200 crore. “Which even today is a reasonable size,” she said later.
The early clients were the people who knew the founders best. Over five years the client list widened. It came to include businesses parking their surplus cash, company promoters and senior executives looking for something other than a plain mutual fund. The firm’s pitch was absolute returns: making money in good markets and bad, rather than simply tracking an index.
On 1 May 2014, Edelweiss Financial Services announced that it had acquired Forefront. Edelweiss’s press release described a high-net-worth manager with about 200 clients across 12 cities, including corporate treasuries, promoters and family offices. It also noted that Forefront’s offshore India Dynamic Value Fund had been nominated for Best India Hedge Fund at the Eurekahedge Asian Hedge Fund Awards that year. Jatia had left to join his family business. Gupta and Moniz stayed on to run the business inside Edelweiss. “We believe we have found a terrific partner,” she said at the time. She later told the Gazette that Edelweiss was “basically the Goldman Sachs of India.”
“I asked for it”
Inside Edelweiss, Gupta moved to the mutual fund business. In 2016 she helped lead the integration of JP Morgan’s Indian mutual fund business into Edelweiss Asset Management.
Then she asked for the top job. “I asked for it!” she told The Better India. In February 2017 she became CEO of Edelweiss Asset Management, at 33 or 34 depending on the account. She was one of India’s youngest heads of a fund house and, at the time, the only woman leading a major one. She has called herself “a start-up girl”.
When she took over, the fund house managed about ₹8,000 crore, Bloomberg reported. She leaned into newer products, including passive funds and India’s first corporate bond ETF, Bharat Bond, which listed in January 2020. By the time of that Bloomberg piece, assets had grown to about ₹30,000 crore. She was already talking about ₹3 lakh crore as a target for 2025.
The girl with the broken neck
In 2018 Gupta gave a talk called “The Girl with the Broken Neck.” In it she spoke openly about the tilt, the rejections and the night in her dorm room. The talk spread widely on YouTube, and the title became her public shorthand. It also made her a prominent voice on money and careers in India, especially on LinkedIn.
She has since written Limitless: The power of unlocking your true potential. In January 2024 she joined Shark Tank India as a judge in its third season, investing in young companies on screen.
Where things stand now
Edelweiss Asset Management kept growing under her. The Better India put its assets at over ₹1.2 lakh crore in January 2024. In August 2025, Business Standard reported that WestBridge Capital had bought a 15% stake in the fund house for ₹450 crore. That valued it at about ₹3,000 crore, or 57 times its FY25 earnings. Assets under management were ₹1.52 lakh crore as of June 2025.
She remains Managing Director and CEO of Edelweiss Mutual Fund. Seventeen years earlier, she started a hedge fund in a country she had never really lived in, with ₹25 lakh from friends, family and “fools”.
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Founder Journeys is a Sakhi Sangini series telling the stories of women who built businesses in India. This story is based on public interviews and reporting.
Cover photo: Edelweiss Asset Management Limited.
Sources: The Pennsylvania Gazette; Bloomberg via BQ Prime / ThePrint (2020); Blume Ventures (November 2023); The Better India (January 2024); Edelweiss Financial Services press release (May 2014); YourStory (June 2022); Business Standard (August 2025).
