Rutika Muchhala, CEO & Co-founder of a Y Combinator funded company, scoops the “Tejaswi Modh Nari Shakti International Award 2018” in the business category

Rutika Muchhala, co-founder and CEO of Scribe, is the latest recipient of the prestigious Tejaswi Modh Nari Shakti International Award in the category of business.

Established in 2006, the Tejaswi Modh Nari Shakti International Award is awarded to visionary female business leaders based on a combination of criteria including impact, innovation and vision, and growth rate. Ms. Muchhala was selected out of a field of over 200,000 women by a selection panel comprised of leading members of the Indian business community, including Vinod Ambani, president of the $66bn conglomerate Reliance Industries Ltd. Past recipients include eminent personalities like Deena Mehta, the first female president of the Bombay Stock Exchange.

Ms. Muchhala demonstrated a penchant for achievement early in life. During high school in India she scored an unprecedented 97% on her board exams – an all-time high that broke the previous national record and placed her 1st all across India.

Her journey to the world of business started at the age of 22, after she graduated from the elite Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay. While she had graduated at the top 5% of her class as an electrical engineer and the prospects in the field were promising, she felt drawn to the high-impact challenges of the business world and accepted an offer to join the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. The combination of the analytical approach she’d learned at IIT along with her innate business instincts quickly made an impact as she helped her first client drive double digit revenue growth in the highly competitive Indian pharmaceutical market.

However, she longed to combine her love of business with the passion for engineering that had drawn her to IIT and in 2012, she packed her bags and moved to San Francisco, so that she could be at the heart of the tech revolution. She was brought on as a product manager for leading mobile entertainment companies like Pocket Gems, valued at $600M, where she developed and grew one of their flagship games.

Ms. Muchhala had displayed an entrepreneurial streak ever since she was young. She started her first business, a small climate-change focused tech company, right as she graduated from college. After graduating from Harvard Business School in 2015, she knew the time was right.

With all of the disruption that the rapid advance of technology had brought to the business world, there was one area that she noticed had, curiously, remained largely untouched: the actual process of selling software.

“When I was doing sales for my previous businesses, I lost a lot of potential deals because of delays while managing so many tasks. And on top of that, a lot of tasks like keeping track of customer data were necessary, but felt mundane and really reduced my efficiency. I talked to other sales people and realized that it wasn’t just me, everyone faced these challenges. The eureka moment occurred when I realized how new developments in AI and Natural Language Processing offered the perfect solution to these problems” said Ms Muchhala.

She estimated that there could be an immediate improvement in sales by more than 30%, by automating these tasks with the application of artificial intelligence. With this realization, Scribe was founded. It was not long before Scribe was accepted into the Winter 2017 cohort of Y Combinator, the world’s leading startup accelerator, which also provided it with seed funding.