Built for women who were never meant to be invisible.
HERTH was born in a moment of quiet fury — at every brilliant woman-led business hidden in plain sight, every homegrown dream dismissed, every entrepreneur who had to shout to be heard in spaces never built for her.
The Herth Promise
She didn't need a seat at the table, she needed a table of her own — and a room full of women who understood why.
63M+
Women-led businesses in India
3%
Receive formal institutional support
∞
Potential waiting to be unlocked
Where it began
We saw something the world had learned to overlook.
“Behind every great city are hundreds of women who make it run — and almost none of them are easy to find.”
It started with a simple, persistent frustration. We kept meeting extraordinary women — a textile designer in Jaipur preserving a craft her grandmother taught her, a caterer in Pune whose food could make you weep with joy, a financial consultant in Chennai who had helped 200 families — and they were all, somehow, impossible to discover.
Their businesses existed in WhatsApp messages, word-of-mouth chains, and hand-written flyers. They had real customers, real talent, and real impact. What they didn't have was visibility.
We asked ourselves: why does a mediocre restaurant with a marketing budget appear before a masterful home chef who has nourished a neighbourhood for fifteen years? Why does an established consultancy dominate search results over a self-taught woman specialist who genuinely knows more?
The answer, we realised, wasn't capability. It was a system built around those who had capital, time, and institutional backing — things that most women entrepreneurs in India are still fighting to access. The world wasn't ignoring them because they weren't good enough. It had simply never been designed to see them.
HERTH was our answer to that design failure.
Not just a listing platform. Not just another directory. A marketplace that actively builds presence, dismantles obscurity, and creates community — because no woman should have to make herself smaller to survive in business.
The founding moment
We sat across from a woman who had run her business for eleven years. She was brilliant, beloved by her customers, and completely unknown beyond her own street. She said,
“I don't know how to be found.”
That sentence broke something open in us. Because it wasn't an admission of inadequacy — it was an indictment of every platform that had failed her. She knew how to make things. She knew how to serve people. She knew how to build relationships that lasted decades. She just didn't know how to exist in a digital world that had never been designed with her in mind.
That day, HERTH stopped being an idea and became a mission.
Our Philosophy
What we believe about women in business.
HERTH is not a neutral platform. We have a point of view — a deeply held belief that the economic empowerment of women is not a niche cause but one of the strongest levers for a stronger India. Everything we build flows from convictions we do not apologise for.
01
Visibility is an Infrastructure
Being discoverable is not a bonus layer for women entrepreneurs. It shapes trust, demand, referrals, and growth. HERTH treats visibility as something foundational.
02
Community is Currency
Women do not grow in isolation. HERTH is built to make discovery, shared learning, and support feel like part of doing business, not something extra to find later.
03
Local roots, wider reach
A business can be deeply local and still deserve broad visibility. HERTH starts with place, but refuses the idea that geography should decide what a business can become.
What we stand against
The world as it was built.
Building HERTH required us to name the things we were building against. Not out of anger, but out of clarity. If you do not name the problem precisely, you build the wrong solution.
Pay-to-be-seen models that reward marketing budgets over business quality — and keep the best-kept-secret businesses permanently secret.
Platforms built for volume that treat every business as a listing, not a story, and every entrepreneur as a data point, not a person.
The myth of meritocracy in business — the lie that every successful entrepreneur simply worked hard enough, while structural advantages go unnamed.
Isolation as the default for women entrepreneurs — the assumption that building a business is a solo journey, and that needing community is a weakness.
Geography as a ceiling — the belief that a business in a small town is a small business, and that local means limited.
Our Vision
Behind every home is a woman who built something — quietly, between school runs and dinner and a hundred invisible tasks.
HERTH exists so she is never invisible again. So, her work has a name. Her name has a place. And every woman who finds her feels the pull of something larger than a transaction — a sisterhood of women who chose to build, and found each other doing it.
Ready to be found?
Join the women who are done being India's best-kept secret. List your business on HERTH and step into a community that wants you to win.