Sairee Chahal is the founder and CEO of SHEROES, a social media platform for women created to address the gender gap in India's internet ecosystem. She started her career in entrepreneurship in 1999 with Newslink Services. SHEROES began as a career-focused platform that connected over 1 million women to jobs but expanded to address all aspects of women's lives, including health, relationships, and entrepreneurship. It now has over 16 million users and helps connect over 10,000 women to remote work opportunities through online counseling, communities, and job listings. Chahal's goal is for SHEROES to be a safe, high-trust online environment tailored specifically for women.

1. SAIREE CHAHAL
Founder & CEO of SHEROES
Made By:
Saloni Agarwal

3. Sairee Chahal is the Founder, CEO of SHEROES - a community
platform for women, offering support, resources,
opportunities and interactions via sheroes.com and sheroes
app.
Her first entrepreneurial experience was in 1999 with
Newslink Services.
Initially SHEROES had almost 1 Million women and 20K
companies signed up in just two year.
Today, SHEROES has over 16 Million women on its network
and about 10K women are working via it as remote workers.

4. • “I never sought permission. If it felt right, I just went ahead
and did it.”
• Sairee is from the small town of Muzaffarnagar in Uttar
Pradesh, she decided to move out just as soon as she was a
teenager.
• “If you are a small-town girl, life can be pretty restrictive
[there],” she said, adding that the opportunities were few, the
society orthodox and what helped her through the time were
books. “We were always taught that we have to face our own
consequences. If you make a decision, you should be
prepared to face the music too!” she added.

5. The Journey That Led Her to SHEROES!
• Leaving her house when she was just 17, Chahal got into Jawaharlal Nehru
University (JNU) for the Russian language course.
• While in her second year of college, she got her first ‘project’ with a couple
in the Indian Foreign Services who were being posted to Moscow. They
were looking for a tutor and she readily took them up on the offer. So by
the time she was done with her five-year course, she already had an
experience of four years with her.
• Soon after, she met Deepak Kamran who was a seafarer by occupation.
Tired of being away from home and feeling left out about what’s
happening in India, Kamran told her that seafarers such as him are always
looking for ways to keep in touch with the outside world. After just one
meeting, both were convinced of the partnership that they were about to
embark on. And soon that led to the birth Newslink Services in 1999, which
catered to those working at sea.
• She said “I really need bigger problems to solve, something more
meaningful and large. And I need a lot of freedom to operate. I cannot sit
in a box and work, I figured I’m not made for corporate set up.”

6. Back To India And Entrepreneurship
• In 2006, she returned to India at a time when tech start-ups were
taking off in the country and set up SAITA Consulting, a company to
help tech start-ups scale by helping them build systems and
processes. In her five years with SAITA she met a lot of women
applicants with a lot of attention from very high calibre women
workers. That’s when she launched Fleximoms, a community-led
platform for companies and women to talk to each other.
• She started empowering women in remote areas through this
platform, providing them with genuine jobs and helping them grow.
• “Men have built the internet and they have built it for themselves,”
– Chahal
• Realising the big gender gap in the Indian internet ecosystem, the
lack of diversity in the workplace and the insignificant amount of
women workforce, she set up SHEROES, which started off as a
career-centric community for women.

7. SHEROES: Social Media for Women, By Women
• Even as a platform that just provided jobs and career opportunities to women,
SHEROES did pretty well. In just two years, they had almost 1 Million women and
20K companies signed up and would post 100K job listings a month.
• SHEROES then set up a helpline for women to enable them to talk to a professional
if they had any sort of career questions.
• “Initially, we would get calls from women who wanted to talk about jobs. ‘How do I
get back to work, how do I find work, how do I work part-time, how do I negotiate a
salary’ and more. But soon, the conversation started to shift, and what we saw was
that women were asking us about everything. They were asking us about health,
relationships, in-laws, children, start-ups, entrepreneurship, and everything else,”
pointed out Chahal.
• “Even if you built something and failed, you are still more valuable. Think of it as an
amazing learning experience, you will get so much to learn and experience. We have
got nothing to lose.”
• Women started coming to SHEROES for everything.

8. Rebirth of SHEROES
• Realising the opportunity that lay ahead, SHEROES became a space for
women to come online in a high trust environment. The idea was to help
women get ‘more from life’ — from careers and jobs to health, family life
and wellbeing.
• “There are a couple of themes that we follow—jobs and income
opportunities, health and wellbeing, sense of identity, networking and
more,” Chahal added.
• Chahal calls the SHEROES helpline a vital part of the company, revealing
that last year it helped counsel over 9 Lakh women through that helpline.
These are one-on-one conversations with counsellors, “We have a team of
professionals—director of women’s health, a bunch of doctors,
counsellors and more—so women can get any and every advice. And they
can get it not only from a counsellor but also from other women, mentors
and more who are all on the network,” explained Chahal.

9. • SHEROES is a safe environment where women can ask about
any personal matter, be it related to domestic violence or
legal rights or puberty, sexuality and more. Not only that but
women can also buy and sell online on the platform.
• “We even promote work, we run a workforce business which
certifies women as remote workers. Today we have over 16
Million women on the network and about 10K women are
working via us as remote workers,” – Sairee Chahal
• Till date, SHEROES has received total funding of over $2.6
Million.
• To further expand its products and to provide a more
seamless experience for women, it has made several
acquisitions such as Gharkamai, an online platform assisting
women to find work from home, health counselling
platform LoveDoctor and women health app, Maya.

10. THANK YOU