Samyak Chakrabarty

Co-founder

Samyak Chakrabarty is the co-founder of Nimaya Foundation (2021)[1], an Indian non-profit working on education, livelihood and women & children from Mumbai.

Samyak Chakrabarty is an Indian social entrepreneur who has spent his career building organisations aimed at young people — first in youth marketing and civic participation, later in employability and skills. He was named to Forbes Asia's 30 Under 30 list for media and marketing in 2016, and co-founded the Nimaya Foundation, which trains women from underrepresented communities for work, with Navya Naveli Nanda in 2021.

Early life and education

Chakrabarty studied at Jai Hind College in Mumbai, taking a Bachelor of Mass Media degree in advertising, marketing and media.

Career

He began founding youth-facing organisations while still young, and has since started several: Operation Black Dot, the Indian International Model United Nations, the Green Batti Project, Youthportal.in and the UN Young Changemakers Conclave. Operation Black Dot was a voter-awareness campaign aimed at college students in Mumbai, deliberately kept free of party affiliation, which its organisers say led some 40,000 first-time voters to register for voter ID cards.

After selling his first company, in youth marketing and advertising, he financially adopted a higher secondary school in the Dharavi area of Mumbai in 2018. He went on to lead X Billion Labs, which he describes as an ecosystem of impact enterprises working on employability, agriculture, healthcare and rural development, and whose projects include a skilling programme, an information platform for rural youth and a behaviour-change initiative.

In 2021 he co-founded the Nimaya Foundation with Navya Naveli Nanda. Nimaya trains women from underrepresented communities for the workforce and says it has trained more than 10,000 across Gujarat, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan. He and Nanda are also the authors of a book, The Map: A Playbook to Navigate the New World, published by HarperCollins India.

Recognition

Forbes named him to its 2016 30 Under 30 Asia list in the media and marketing category. Indian trade press at the time reported him as the only Indian from the advertising and marketing industry on that year's list.[2][3][4][5][6][7]

Nimaya Foundation

Nimaya is a non-profit career accelerator co-founded in 2021 by Navya Naveli Nanda and Samyak Chakrabarty that trains young women from low-income and restrictive backgrounds in generative-AI tools and 21st-century workplace skills. Its two programmes, #GenAIReadyNaari and the #FutureReadyNaari Fellowship, combine classroom training, capstone projects with companies and placement support. Nimaya runs as a programme of the Foundation for Future Ready Nari and has signed an MoU with the Government of India's IndiaAI Mission.

Nimaya Foundation reports the following, on its own site:

10,000+ Naaris Trained
5 States - Gujarat, Maharashtra, Uttar-Pradesh, Haryana & Rajasthan
Enabling 10,000 (and counting) young women from restrictive backgrounds to build meaningful careers in the future of work
4,000 farmers' daughters skilled for new-age enterprises - Faridabad & Kurukshetra