Indian-American technology entrepreneur Neha Narkhede is the co-founder of Oscilar Incorporated, a software development company that is a no-code, AI-powered risk decisioning platform that helps fintechs manage fraud, credit, and compliance risks. Oscilar’s AI risk decisioning technology allows companies to quickly and accurately assess the risk of every online transaction in only a few milliseconds.

Narkhede was raised in Pune, Maharashtra and went to the Pune Institute of Computer Technology (PICT), University of Pune, where she earned her Bachelor of Science in engineering. She went on to study computer science and earn her master’s degree as a graduate student at Georgia Tech before accepting her first job at Oracle as a principal software engineer.

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After leaving Oracle, Narkhede worked at LinkedIn as a software engineer. While there she helped develop the open-source messaging system Apache Kafka, which is now used by more than 80% of the Fortune 500. In 2017, she also co-authored the book Kafka: The Definitive Guide, along with Gwen Shapira and Todd Palino, which is about the technology that created Kafka.

Narkhede and two of her colleagues left LinkedIn in 2014 to found Confluent, a B2B infrastructure company. Confluent helps organizations process large amounts of data to create transformative real-time products. The $388 million company went public in June of 2021 at a $9.1 billion valuation, with her and her family owning approximately 8%. She later stepped into the role of Chief Product Officer, a position she held until 2020. She now serves as a board member.

Having been listed as one of America’s Top Self-Made Women by Forbes, Forbes’s Top 50 Women in Tech, MIT Tech Review’s Innovators under 35 and Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People, she understands that a major way to push your career forward is to unabashedly ask for it.

“It’s important to do that because you may not be handed down those opportunities,” Narkhede said in an interview with CNBC. “The industry still evaluates women on experience alone, while they evaluate men on potential, so you will be waiting a long time for that opportunity if you don’t specifically ask for it.”