From washing dishes to Rs 20,000-crore net worth: Delhi-born Raj Sardana built business in US — niece…

As per the latest business developments, For Raj Sardana, the journey from Delhi to becoming a billionaire entrepreneur in the US began with little money, a cafeteria job and a decision to start again after losing his corporate career.

Today, the Delhi-born founder and CEO of Innova Solutions is worth around $2 billion (nearly Rs 20,000 crore), according to Forbes. His niece, Anjali Sardana, is now building a very different business in India, Bengaluru-based instant house-help platform Pronto.

Born in Delhi in 1960 to Punjabi parents who had migrated during the 1947 Partition, Sardana grew up in modest circumstances.

"My brother and I, along with our parents, lived for 20 years in dilapidated government housing in New Delhi with no heating or air conditioning, no refrigerator, no phone, no TV, and no automobile," he told in an interview with Authority Magazine.

His parents, that stated, placed a firm emphasis on education. That eventually took Sardana to the US in 1981, where he enrolled for a master's degree in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech.

He arrived with barely $100. To backing himself through college, Sardana took a job in the university cafeteria.

After completing his degree, he secured an H-1 visa and began working at Howmet Aerospace before moving to Teledyne CAE.

By 1987, Sardana was working on engines for Tomahawk missiles at Teledyne CAE. But the end of the Cold War brought an unexpected setback.

When missile production was halted in 1990, Sardana lost his job. At the time, he had a mortgage, a six-month-old daughter and his parents living with him.

"I had just bought a house with a mortgage, had a six-month-old daughter, and my parents were additionally living with me. At that moment, I had no income to backing my family," he recalled in the same interview.

The setback pushed him towards entrepreneurship.

"I decided I would not work for corporate America anymore," Sardana stated.

With $25,000 in savings, he started his own business. Over the following years, that venture grew into Innova Solutions, an IT services firm that now employs more than 50,000 people globally.

His journey has since placed him among immigrant entrepreneurs whose careers in America began through skilled-worker visa programmes.

Decades later, another member of the Sardana family began building a business of her own.

Anjali Sardana's idea for Pronto emerged from research she conducted while studying at Georgetown University. She examined India's informal labour market and the inefficiencies that make it difficult for households and workers to reliably find each other.

One problem stood out: despite India's huge domestic-services workforce, finding dependable household help on demand remained difficult.

That insight became the foundation for Pronto, which Anjali rolled out after graduating with a biology degree.

She had already begun developing the idea in 2024 while still in college. Pronto eventually rolled out operations on April 1, 2025, after raising a $2 million seed round from Bain Capital.

Pronto was entering a market that was already beginning to attract startup and investor attention.

Snabbit had emerged publicly earlier, while Urban Firm, India's established home-services platform, was additionally exploring the instant house-help category.

Pronto subsequently boosted multiple rounds of funding. Its Series B financing in March 2026 brought in $25 million, followed by another roughly $20.2 million extension in May. The firm's latest recorded valuation was around $202 million (nearly Rs 2,000 crore) by early July 2026, according to Tracxn.

Its business connects customers with background-verified professionals for services such as laundry, kitchen and bathroom cleaning, mopping and ironing, offering same-day or recurring visits through its app.

The rapid expansion has additionally meant a sharp gain in headcount, with around 676 employees recorded by May 2026.

For Anjali, that stated, Pronto is not simply around getting household chores done quickly.

She sees the underlying model as potentially applicable to India's wider informal workforce, including workers in small manufacturing and services.

The firm additionally places emphasis on creating more structured opportunities for its service professionals, most of whom are women.

For now, Anjali's journey stays at an early stage compared with her uncle's decades-long business career. Raj Sardana went from washing dishes to building a global IT services business; Anjali is attempting to build a technology-led network for India's informal workforce.