Deeksha comes with 9 years of experience across Ed-tech, Food-tech, Beauty-tech, Media-tech and Healthcare tech. She has always been driven, energetic & passionate about creating value through the work she does at any stage of her life; and that’s what inspires her to do all that she does.Deeksha believes that each one of us has been destined to achieve something truly unique; her mission is to drive diversity through entrepreneurship. Ever since her college days, she had been fascinated by startups and the impact that they can create for the better.An entrepreneur at heart, Deeksha translated that love for entrepreneurship into a venture that she Co-founded 7 years back.At a time when her peers were accepting job offers from some of the top firms, Deeksha willingly turned down lucrative offers from the likes of Google and Zomato to venture onto her own journey as an entrepreneur. Deeksha co-founded a venture called Cedarwood in the edtech space back in 2013 (www.cedarwood.co.in), which is a platform that enables parents to discover courses inspired by 21st century skills for their children. Today, Cedarwood boasts of delivering 500,000+ hours of skilling courses to 5000+ students and is one of players that went digital with all of its course offerings as soon as the pandemic hit. Cedarwood is also re-inventing teaching as a flexible work from home option for women on break, thereby creating a generation of financially independent women. Deeksha played a key role in developing the go-to market strategy and spearheaded key functions such as marketing, business development & operations and assisted in content creation and Tech implementation. A Startup Consultant & Ecosystem Enabler Being an entrepreneur gives Deeksha a wide and objective perspective on almost every business process; and she leverages that experience to foster entrepreneurship through her second venture. Deeksha noted that most startup founders were not engaging with larger ecosystems like corporates, banks, tech companies, etc. Both ecosystems were innovating and solving problems, but in silos. Being a big believer in the power of collaboration, Deeksha believed that these ecosystems working together could create a larger impact. Thus, Collaborat-her (https://www.collaborat-her.com/) was born. Collaborat-her is a boutique consulting firm that aims at creating, nurturing and kickstarting some of the most innovative initiatives to foster the startup ecosystem. The same is done by creating unique IPs for a diverse set of entrepreneurs; all focussed on helping their ventures achieve scale and sustainability. One such unique IP that she launched was a virtual business pitching event called Pitch It that aims at helping early stage startups raise money from strategic investors. As she states, “In a time like this, startups have the agility and ability to bring about the much needed innovation for us to strive through the pandemic; in times like this helping them access capital that would fuel their growth seemed exceedingly important.” Another impactful IP was launched in collaboration with HSBC called Sustain to Scale, an interview series focusing on growth-stage women founded companies. The series aimed to capture how the companies had scaled and sustained themselves through the pandemic. 16 amazing women entrepreneurs were interviewed, including Neha Kant (Founder of Clovia), Aarti Gill (Founder of OZiva), Malika Sadani (Founder of The Moms Co.) and many more.