The rise of Hindu religious entrepreneurship – and what it tells us about decolonising Indian business

“Entrepreneurs in India are launching faith-tech businesses that format religious sources and experiences for modern consumers. Sreevas Sahasranamam and Anupama Kondayya find that these founders are seeking to reclaim Hindu culture and challenge the Western bias of modern capitalism with their business models, which are heavily influenced by Hindu philosophies . In India, the ancient is meeting the futuristic and the traditional is meeting the artificial. Entrepreneurs are making ancient Hindu philosophies reachable and relevant through thoroughly modern means. Indian ventures such as WhoVR , Mokx , Sutradhar , and Brhat are leveraging artificial intelligence and virtual reality to bridge modern lives with ancient wisdom. Through these ventures, consumers can step into distant or historically significant temples, draw on enduring insights to navigate personal and professional challenges, and enable younger generations to meaningfully engage with these traditions. These are no longer curiosities at the fringes of religion and technology, but a part of what we call “Hindu religious entrepreneurship” – entrepreneurship that blends faith, technology and heritage to serve contemporary needs. As a phenomenon, entrepreneurship and its understanding remain heavily rooted in Western assumptions and approaches. In 1904 Max Weber wrote how the “Protestant Ethic” fuels entrepreneurship and capitalism by seeing work as a calling, legitimising the generation and pursuit of profit and encouraging reinvestment rather than accumulation. Effort and efficiency are seen as the cornerstones of economic activity. Over the decades, these philosophical foundations and assumptions have been taken for granted while the practices associated with modern capitalism have been exported to countries across the world through various waves of colonisation. So much so that even in Hindu-majority countries like India, entrepreneurship has been seen through the Western gaze post colonisation and non-Western philosophies of economic pursuit were marginalised. This intellectual framing has historically relegated indigenous perspectives like Hinduism to the private sphere, casting them as anachronistic and incompatible with modern economic life. Despite Hinduism being the world’s third largest religion, the role of Hinduism in entrepreneurship has been strikingly under‑examined in business research. India now hosts over 1,000 faith-based startups, according to Tracxn. Investment in the sector has grown rapidly, rising from $5 million in 2023 to around $51 million in 2024, before moderating to around $30 million in 2025. Our new qualitative study is among the first systematic academic explorations of Hindu religious entrepreneurship. The research shows that founders are using entrepreneurship as a way to preserve, reinterpret and contemporise ancient Hindu philosophical wisdom for modern contexts. Entrepreneurs seeking to decolonise Hinduism For Hindu religious entrepreneurs that we interviewed, the seeds of entrepreneurship were sown when Western frameworks failed to help them navigate personal or professional crises, while indigenous Hindu philosophical resources offered clarity. One interviewee told us that: “When I was going through a great phase in my career in my life, what would I take inspiration from? The TED talks of the world, self-help books of the world…but when all of them did not actually work for me, what worked was the Bhagavad Gita.” This led them to recognise a compartmentalised identity within themselves and others, one where the public and professional self aligned with seemingly secular Western frameworks while the private self engaged with indigenous culture and practices, including Hindu religious practices. Post‑colonial thinkers have long argued that colonial education produced a “colonisation of the mind”, creating deep psychological divides and compartmentalisation in formerly colonised societies like India. Recognition of the value of Hindu perspectives and this psychological divide led our respondents to develop the desire to decolonise Hinduism by making it legitimate and relevant in the professional sphere. This is the core of what we term “Hindu religious entrepreneurial intention”: individuals seeking to reintegrate personal and professional identities through venturing. Entrepreneurship as Dharma The founders also saw entrepreneurship as part of their Dharma, a moral duty to preserve, reinterpret and renew their cultural and spiritual heritage. This reframes entrepreneurship as a moral and civilizational responsibility, rather than merely a pursuit of economic returns. This approach is rooted in the Hindu philosophical framework of Purusharthas, the four aims of life: Dharma (right action), Artha (prosperity), Kama (well‑being) and Moksha (liberation). In practice, these entrepreneurs consciously integrate Karma (entrepreneurial action) with Dharma (duty) and Artha (rightful prosperity), directing their ventures towards social upliftment and collective well-being – an understanding of Kama that extends beyond pleasure to include cultural and societal flourishing. Entrepreneurs as translators of ancient wisdom A central finding of our research is that Hindu religious entrepreneurs act as cultural translators who take dense, scriptural or ritual knowledge and contemporise it for modern life. They move religious narratives out of “temporal silos” – the notion that Vedic wisdom belongs only to the past – to render them usable in everyday contexts. This involves entrepreneurs turning Hindu religious artefacts into consumer‑facing products or services such as apps, comics, merchandise or immersive experiences to make ancient knowledge accessible to, as one entrepreneur put it, “busy modern Indians”. It also included embedding guiding principles from ancient scriptures directly into product design, such as drawing from the Bhavishya Purana to set guardrails around technology development. Entrepreneurs challenging the Protestant ethic Modern capitalism and, consequently, entrepreneurship, for nearly a century, have been shaped by Protestant ethics. Hindu religious entrepreneurs are challenging this fundamental understanding of modern entrepreneurship at multiple levels by seeing economic activity as sacred rather than strictly secular. They are deprioritising profits for the purpose of the revival of religious tenets. Drawing inspiration from the Vedas and Upanishads, these entrepreneurs see knowledge not as proprietary. Thus, they consciously avoid strong intellectual property (IP) protection, treating knowledge as meant for collective benefit. Such practices present an alternate approach to innovation or modern enterprise, disrupting Western assumptions. Our findings point to three actionable recommendations for India’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. First, there is a need to seed faith‑tech incubators, that pair engineers with religious scholars and temple custodians. Here a Christian-technology movement in America could serve as a model. Second, because many Hindu religious entrepreneurs consciously de‑prioritise profit and proprietary IP in favour of reviving and contemporising religious tenets, they require a distinct class of patient, mission‑aligned investors who recognise non-Western success logics. Third, the momentum created by the Indian government’s education policy’s emphasis on Indian Knowledge Systems offers an opportunity to strengthen the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem for Hindu religious ventures. By building institutional support around this emerging sector, India can begin to mainstream historically marginalised indigenous knowledge, integrating it into contemporary innovation rather than relegating it to the periphery. This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics. You are agreeing with our comment policy when you leave a comment. Image credit: Sumit Saraswat provided by Shutterstock. 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