Ritu Srivastava, Co-Founder of TheLightbulb.AI named winner of Prosus Tech FoundHER Challenge 2025
New Delhi, India – 02 June 2025 – Ritu Srivastava, Co-Founder of TheLightbulb has been named the winner of the Prosus Tech FoundHER Challenge 2025 at an awards ceremony held at Bangalore’s Oberoi Hotel, attended by former Minister of Education of India, Smriti Irani. The national competition celebrated India’s most promising women-led tech startups and offered equity-free grants from Prosus, a leading global investor in technology. As the winning female founder, Ritu was awarded an equity-free grant of US$50k.
TheLightbulb, a full-stack emotion AI platform that uses visual AI and conversational AI to generate real-time emotion and engagement analytics for digital user interactions, earned the first prize from over 120 applicants and seven finalists. The second-place award went to Shailja Mittal, Founder of RxMen, a men’s health platform using AI for root-cause-based treatment, and the third-place award was shared by Mansi Jain, CEO of Digital Paani, an IoT platform for wastewater treatment, and Ankita Garg, Co-Founder and COO or Varaha ClimateAg, a carbon removal startup.
The other top finalists included: Annu Talreja, Founder of Accacia; Hanit Awal, Co-Founder of Darwix AI; Mansi Jain, CEO of Digital Paani; and Akanksha Hazari, Founder and CEO of LoveLocal.
The Tech FoundHER Challenge, launched earlier this year on International Women’s Day, is a new program from Prosus addressing the global disparity in venture capital funding, where less than 5% goes to female-founded startups. Research from Springboard Enterprises shows women-led companies deliver 35% higher ROI—making it both an equity and business imperative.
Prajna Khanna, Global Head of Sustainability at Prosus Group, said: “We launched this challenge to spotlight and support women building game-changing solutions in tech. The quality of innovation we’ve seen is inspiring—and this is just the beginning.”
Winners were selected by an esteemed judging panel, including: Anjali Bansal, Founding Partner of Avaana Climate and Sustainability Fund; Apurva Dixit, Investor at Blume Ventures; Ronak Sandil, Director of Investments and Corporate Development at Amazon; Archana Jahagirdar, Founder and Managing Partner at Rukam Capital; Martin Tshopp, CEO, Prosus Ventures; and Priyanka Chopra, CFO, Prosus Ventures.
To apply, companies were required to have at least one female founder in a leadership role, be at the pre-Series A to Series B growth stage and be revenue-generating while showing show market validation. Applications were assessed based on criteria related to innovation, market potential, scalability, and impact.
Prosus was proud to partner with women founded companies, Encubay and Vaia Climate, on this important initiative.