Chandigarh, April 12 -- One has built an AI powered patent intelligence platform, and did it before generative AI was even a buzzword. Another is running a chain of healthcares across the country. The third has turned a university campus into a launchpad for the next generation of founders. At TiECON Chandigarh 2026, these women didn't just attend, they led. In 2006, Komal Sharma Talwar, (now the founder of TT Consultants and XLSCOUT) a young law student at Panjab University was advised by a senior legal practitioner to get into intellectual property - then a niche, barely explored field in India. She took that advice, started a company with Rs.1,500 in savings and her mother's Rs.1 lakh cheque, and built it into aglobally awarded IP consulting firm with 500 engineers and lawyers across offices in India, Washington DC, San Francisco, Tokyo and Germany. That was just the first act. Today, her SaaS platform allows anyone, regardless of their legal or technical background, to file patents, track global innovation and find collaborators, all through AI. It is used by Fortune 500 companies across the world and featured in Forbes Japan. She has two sons, a husband who missed professional opportunities so she could travel, and parents and in laws who held the fort at home. On being asked if she has any regrets looking back, "If it was a mistake," she says of building not one but two companies, "I won't have made it twice." The healthcare innovator, Sheenu Jhawar did not initially set out to run hospitals. She married into a family of doctors, her father-in-law and mother-in-law were the first generation, her husband the second, and found herself not just inheriting a business, but transforming it. Today, as director at Apex Hospitals, she oversees a chain of seven multi specialty hospitals across Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, operating in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities where profit margins are thin and good doctors are hard to attract. Her answer to that challenge has been relentless process automation. Procurement teams that once grew with every new hospital now stay lean because the processes are automated. Patient feedback, from QR codes, Google reviews, app ratings lands directly with her, with a firm internal rule-acknowledge within 12 hours, resolve structurally, not just reactively. "The patient is always right," she says. "and a little self-doubt is not a bad thing if you believe you're already doing the best there is, that's the beginning of the end." On the TiE Global Board of Trustees, one of only 11 elected members, Jhawar is also clear eyed about where women stand. "I don't believe in equal platform. I believe in equal opportunity." The glass ceiling, she says, is cracking, but slowly. "Breaking it is difficult. But this is just a phase." In 2002, a mathematics school teacher Madhu Chitkara quit her government job and started an engineering college from scratch, with no savings, no consultants and no playbook, just a partner and vision. Her first batch of 220 students were the ones no other college had wanted, the lowest rankers, the last resort admissions. By the end of that first year, all four branches of Chitkara Institute of Engineering and Technology had topped the Punjab Technical University results. By 2010, it had become Chitkara University, the first private university under Punjab's new university act....