Adar Cyrus Poonawalla

The 35-year-old son of India’s seventh-richest man, Cyrus Poonawalla, is associated with two contrasting superlatives: Asia’s largest vaccine maker and one of India’s largest stud farms. After completing undergraduate business management studies at the University of Westminster in the U.K., Adar stepped into his father’s shoes and expanded the Serum Institute of India Ltd.’s operations across 140 countries, making it the third-largest vaccine producer in the world.

When he’s not making life-saving serums combating diphtheria, measles, hepatitis or mumps — jabbed into roughly 65 percent of world’s children — Adar can be found breeding race horses or customizing cars. Adar once fashioned an S-Class Mercedes into a winged Batmobile after his son asked him if Batman and his ride were real.

The Poonawallas also own a 200-acre stud farm that’s bred at least 343 race-winning horses. Last year, they bought a former Maharaja’s residence in Mumbai for $120 million — a property that had recently served as the U.S. consulate — as a weekend retreat from their Pune home that’s about four hours away.

The spending spree hasn’t diluted the focus at Serum. Adar’s vision is to triple revenue to 120 billion rupees ($1.8 billion) over the next seven years, according to a September interview, and add products including a rotavirus vaccine that can protect against as many as five strains of the pathogen. Next up: initial public offering?

Kavin Bharti Mittal

The 28-year old son of Sunil Bharti Mittal inherited the entrepreneurial bug from his father, who started out at 18 making bicycle crankshafts and importing portable Suzuki generators before creating Bharti Airtel Ltd., India’s top wireless carrier.

Kavin, at 20, founded AppSpark to develop applications for the mobile phones. In 2009, AppSpark launched an iPhone application, Movies Now, to help users buy film tickets on the move. In 2012, Kavin set up Hike Messenger, an instant-messaging service similar to WhatsApp. By June 2014, Hike Messenger crossed 20 million users, catapulted by a privacy feature that lets teenagers flirt in private and hide chats from their parents. By then, it had received at least $21 million from Bharti Enterprises Pvt. Ltd. and SoftBank Corp. In August 2014,Tiger Global Management invested $65 million.

“Hike believes that messaging will do for mobile what the browser did for the desktop times a 100,” company spokeswoman Minita Kumar wrote in an e-mail about the founder's vision for his firm.

The chat app, which now also allows group calling and file sharing, reached 100 million users earlier this year — a milestone at which he could start talking about “monetization,” Kavin said in a 2014 interview. Having interned at McLaren Racing, Google and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the younger Mittal should know a thing or two about making money off ideas.