Ashish is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Mara Group. He started his first company at the age of 15.

In 1996, Ashish borrowed $6,000 to start his first IT Company where he bought and sold computers. Brimming with confidence, he chose to drop out of school and concentrate on his business which at that point, merely constituted of buying and selling computers and floppy disks; from Dubai to Uganda.

In an interview with Arabic Knowledge@Wharton, Ashish stated concerning those early days, “I didn’t have enough working capital to do cargoes and shipments. I would travel to Dubai every weekend. Fill my suitcase with IT stuff. Pay my taxes on Monday. Sell Tuesday through Friday. Get my cash on Friday…That was my cycle for six months. And then I was thinking, “There are so many people coming to Dubai to do exactly the same thing. Why don’t I set up a base to help them? We then set up an office in Dubai when I was 15 in 1996 to actually supply IT hardware into African countries. And the rest is history.”

His company, Mara Group, a 16 year-old pan-African multi-sector business conglomerate with operations in 26 countries spans four continents. Mara’s current businesses operate in a broad range of sectors including information technology (IT) services, business process outsourcing (BPO), a multi-faceted mobile-enabled online platform, agriculture, real estate, hospitality, packaging and asset management.

Mara Group has received global recognition for its achievements and contributions not only in Africa but also worldwide. In 2010, he was also appointed as a World Economic Forum Global Young Leader by the World Economic Forum.