Meet Suneera Madhani, who declined the Rs 145 crore offer to build Rs 8200 crore company
Suneera Madhani is a successful entrepreneur who has gained recognition for her incredible decision-making skills. Madhani declined a lucrative offer of Rs. 145 crores to build a company that is now worth Rs. 8200 crores. Here are some key points about her story:
Suneera Madhani is a woman of substance. She not only built a successful startup from scratch, but she also created a self-help group of 300,000 women CEOs — all at just 34. She was hundreds of kilometers away from America’s tech incubators of the famous Silicon Valley.
She, however, built a billion-dollar company. This is when the majority of funding eludes people of color and minorities in America. Here’s the story of a migrant who made it big in the land of dreams, the United States.
Suneera Madhani and her brother Sal Rehmetullah started Stax in 2014. The business model of the company revolves around their payment platform that charges flat-rate monthly subscriptions rather than percentages of sales model offered by all the other payment platforms. Over the past eight years, the company has employed over 300 people and completed transactions worth $23 billion. She told CNBC last year that she was a reluctant entrepreneur, unsure of herself.
Her parents had immigrated from Pakistan’s Karachi. They ran multiple businesses, from convenience stores to cafes, and most ended in failure. After finishing college (finance from the University of Florida), she worked with Atlanta-based payment processor First Data, selling payment terminals to business owners. She got the idea of doing away with the percentage-based transactions. She went to her bosses, 12 banks — all scoffed at her.
During a dinner-time discussion, her parents in Orlando asked her to work on her idea herself. The siblings took six months off work to see if they could walk the talk. She took her Volkswagen Beetle and pitched her idea to businesses in Orlando. They signed 100 clients. They were offered a $17.5 million dollar (Rs 145 crore) deal to buy Stax. They refused. With the offer, they got validation that they were on to something.
When they were left with only four months of salary money, they took a loan of 500000 dollars to get some more runway. By last year, they had generated $263 million in total funding at a valuation of over one billion dollars. She also founded a group called CEOSchool.
“A community I’ve created for female entrepreneurs to help them scale to The 2% Club and the go-to online community for resources, courses, workshops, and mentorship for founders at every stage. Look out for my stories for all the value-packed resources and to be the first to know when doors open with the BEST deals,” she wrote on Instagram. She also runs a podcast channel. She is the mother of two daughters — Mila and Aana.
Staff Reporter
