Anthyesti Funeral Services

A female software engineer from Hyderabad who spent nine years in IT, walked away from its comfortable predictability to build India's most organised professional funeral services company, built from a deeply personal experience of grief-during-chaos, and became the subject of a Harvard Business School case study, a Tollywood biopic announcement, and a National Entrepreneurship Award — all before appearing on Shark Tank India at age 36. An electrical engineer by graduation, Reddy worked as a software engineer for nine years before taking the plunge into entrepreneurship. "Life was very smooth for an IT professional, but the thirst for doing something out of the box prompted me to take the big leap," says Reddy, who launched Anthyesti in March 2016. Anthyesti, meaning "last rites" in Sanskrit, was founded in 2016 by Shruthi Reddy, entrepreneur who saw the pain and disorganization surrounding death rituals after losing a loved one.

Anthyesti is India's first and most geographically extensive professional funeral services aggregation platform — providing a 24/7 single-contact point that coordinates all post-death logistics (hearse van, body preservation, priest of appropriate religious tradition, cremation or burial ground booking, documentation, Asthi Visarjan, domestic and international repatriation of human remains) through a vetted vendor network across multiple cities, removing the burden of unorganised, exploitative, and logistically complex funeral arrangements from families at their most vulnerable.