Executive Director, Emcure Pharmaceuticals | Joined 2007 | Pune
A condition at home
Namita Thapar was born in Pune in 1977. Her father, Satish Mehta, founded Emcure Pharmaceuticals in 1981. It grew into a company that mainly makes formulations and active pharmaceutical ingredients, Business Today reported.
The family business was there, but it was not handed to her. Her father set a condition for both his children. “My father repeatedly reminded me and my brother that we needed a solid education and work experience,” she told Entrepreneur India in 2018.
She took that seriously. She qualified as a chartered accountant at 21. About a year later she went to the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University in the United States for an MBA, Business Today reported in 2021.
Six years somewhere else
After Duke, she did not go home. She joined Guidant Corporation, an American maker of cardiovascular devices, and spent six years there in finance and marketing. It gave her what her father had asked for: real work experience, in a large company.
Then her father asked her to come back to Emcure. By her own account, the timing suited her too. She had become a mother, and it felt like the right moment to return to India, Business Today reported in 2023.
Looking back, she valued the years away. “I worked outside before moving to join Emcure and that was critical,” she said.
2007: chief financial officer
She joined Emcure in early 2007 as chief financial officer. At the time it was a ₹500 crore company, Business Today reported. Her father had also raised money from the private equity firm Blackstone, Business Today noted.
Finance was where her training lay, but it was not where she wanted to stay. She wanted to run the profit and loss of a business. Her father needed persuading. It “took me two years to convince my father,” she told Business Today. Entrepreneur India reported that she had to work hard to show him she could run the India business.
She got the job. Over time she took charge of finance, human resources and the India business, which by 2018 included more than 4,000 medical representatives, Entrepreneur India reported. Her husband and brother looked after the international business. “I have found my calling in marketing,” she told Business Today.
Building the system
With a sales force of thousands, she focused on structure. She pushed for a younger management team to build depth, Entrepreneur India reported. She brought in automation and new systems, and moved the company into new therapy areas. She wanted human resources to be a strategic function, not an administrative one.
She credited the company’s growth to two things in particular, Business Today reported in 2021: a system-driven organisation, and a culture of dissent.
Her approach to her own job was simple. “The way to handle that is to hire people way smarter than me and empowering them,” she told Business Today in 2023. “I am very good at time management.”
By 2021, Business Today reported, Emcure had grown from ₹500 crore to more than ₹6,000 crore. By early 2023 it described a ₹7,000 crore business.
Teaching the next generation
In 2017 she started Incredible Ventures, which teaches entrepreneurship to students aged 11 to 18, according to Kuvera’s profile of her. In 2018 Entrepreneur India described her running the Indian franchise of the Young Entrepreneurs Academy, a programme for the same age group.
She also took on outside roles. She sits on the board of Finolex Cables and on the India regional advisory board of Duke’s Fuqua School.
Shark Tank India
In December 2021 Shark Tank India went on air, and she became one of its investors. In a piece for YourStory in 2022, she said the show tested every ounce of her inner strength. Her rule for investing, she wrote, was “to invest only if you believe in the cause and can add value.”
That rule produced a line that viewers remembered. When she could not judge a business, she said so and left. On one pitch she said, in a mix of Hindi and English, that she could not relate to it, “aur mera expertise isme nahi hai so for that reason I’m out.” When a technology pitch went past her, she said she did not properly understand the technology. It became the line most viewers associate with her.
She saw the show as more than a set of deals. It was, she told Business Today, “a platform to share stories of India’s entrepreneurs, our job creators and to inspire and impact.” She also used her new public profile to talk about subjects she felt were avoided, especially “those that are taboo where the mindset needs to change,” including mental health and women’s issues.
She was not always comfortable with her own caution. “At times did I play it safe rather than take risky bets?” she asked herself in the YourStory piece. She named two founders she passed on as her biggest regrets from the first season.
But she kept investing on the same terms, across later seasons and more than 25 startups, Kuvera reported.
Taking Emcure public
In July 2024 Emcure went public. Its initial public offering raised about ₹1,952 crore, with shares priced at ₹960 to ₹1,008, BW Businessworld reported. Investors bid for nearly 68 times the shares on offer. She sold part of her 3.5% stake in the offering. BW Businessworld calculated that her shares had cost her about ₹3.44 each. Her father, who held 41.85%, also sold a small number of shares in the offering.
She was part of the senior team that led the IPO roadshows, which she called “exciting, exhausting and a great learning experience,” Business Today reported in November 2024. “All the hard work we put in for Emcure’s IPO (in July) was super successful,” she said. She also spoke about Emcure’s “foray into consumer health, with a focus on women’s health.”
Where Emcure stands now
In FY26 Emcure crossed $1 billion in revenue for the first time. It reported revenue of ₹9,204 crore, up 16.6%, and profit after tax of ₹941 crore, Indian Pharma Post reported in May 2026. Its India business, which she leads as executive director, brought in ₹4,027 crore, up 10%. The company described FY26 as the first year of a new five-year plan.
When she joined as CFO in 2007, Emcure was a ₹500 crore company. Today its India business alone is about eight times that size. She got there by learning one part of the business properly before asking for the next, and by being willing to say when something was outside what she knew.
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: supplied to Sakhi Sangini.
Sources: Entrepreneur India (August 2018); Business Today (December 2021; March 2023; December 2023; November 2024); YourStory (February 2022); ScoopWhoop; BW Businessworld (July 2024); Indian Pharma Post (May 2026); Kuvera.
