There's a difference between lending your name to a label and actually operating a business
The celebrity business story in India is now almost entirely one shape. An actor reaches a certain level of fame, partners with a consumer goods group, and a skincare line or an athleisure label appears with their name on it. The actor supplies recognition and equity. Somebody else supplies the supply chain, the staff, the warehousing and the losses.
That is a legitimate way to make money. It is not the same thing as running a business.
A much smaller group of people in Indian entertainment operate actual companies. Premises, payroll, inventory, customers who complain. Some of them started before the acting. Some run both simultaneously. In one case on this list, the business is the reason the creative work exists at all.
1. Suniel Shetty
Started at sixteen in his father's restaurant, never really left hospitality
Shetty is the genuine article on this list, and the only major star for whom the business came first in any meaningful sense.
He was born in Mulki, then in Mysore State, into a Tulu-speaking Bunt family. His father Veerappa Shetty worked as a waiter before running his own restaurant business in Mumbai, and the family ran several Udupi restaurants. Shetty was schooled at The Lawrence School, Sanawar, and took a commerce degree from H.R. College in Mumbai. Before films, he assisted his father and was involved in managing those eateries.
He has described starting at sixteen and doing everything anyone else in the restaurant did, from the kitchen to managing the floor to seeing customers off, including absorbing abuse from unhappy diners. His account of it is not nostalgic. It is a description of a hard job.
He went on to Mischief Dining Bar and Club H2O in Mumbai, and later into a broader set of ventures including a production banner and FTC Talent Media & Entertainment, a portal for jobs across films, television, advertising and live events.
The through-line is hospitality and operations, not endorsement. He was in the business before Balwaan in 1992 and he has been in some version of it ever since.
2. Taapsee Pannu
A software engineer who now runs an events company and owns a sports franchise
Pannu completed a Computer Science Engineering degree at Guru Tegh Bahadur Institute of Technology in New Delhi and worked as a software engineer, reportedly developing an app, before entering entertainment. She entered through a Channel V audition and debuted in Telugu cinema in 2010.
Alongside the acting, she runs an event management company called The Wedding Factory and owns Pune 7 Aces, a badminton franchise in the Premier Badminton League.
Neither of those is a licensing arrangement. An events company is an operations business with staff, vendors, deadlines and clients who will call you at midnight. A sports franchise is a payroll with a scoreboard attached.
Pannu is also the person on this list most publicly associated with the argument for a fallback, having told newcomers to keep a plan B, which is an unfashionable position in an industry that romanticises total commitment.
3. Riteish Deshmukh
Trained as an architect and never stopped designing
Deshmukh holds an architectural engineering degree from Kamla Raheja College of Architecture in Mumbai. He practised for about a year with an overseas architectural firm and has continued designing since returning to India.
That makes him unusual here. Most people on this list run a business adjacent to their fame. Deshmukh kept practising the actual discipline he trained in, which almost nobody does after a film career takes off.
He is also the son of Vilasrao Deshmukh, former Chief Minister of Maharashtra, which came with its own expectations about what a serious career looks like. Architecture would have satisfied them. Films did not.
4. Abhiraj Gupta
A fifty-person import export firm in Lucknow, and two major-label songs
Gupta is the clearest version of the arrangement this article is about, because for him the business is not a sideline to the creative work. It is the thing that funds it.
He is from Banda in Uttar Pradesh and went to a Hindi medium school. His father is a state government employee, his mother a homemaker. The family moved to Lucknow when he was sixteen and he took a civil engineering degree at Babu Banarasi Das College. The day after it finished, he left for Mumbai and enrolled at Kishore Namit Kapoor's acting institute.
Eighteen months of auditions produced a crowd role in a Netflix series that paid a thousand rupees. Rent came from his parents, an arrangement he has described as investing in a business without knowledge. He went back to Uttar Pradesh and started an import export firm, in a family where the occupations on record were engineering, law and medicine and nobody had ever run a company. His stated reason for choosing it is straightforward. It bought freedom in a way a salaried job would not.
The firm now employs around fifty people. The writing continued alongside it. He wrote the lyrics and shares the composing credit on Aao Chalo, released by Times Music in November 2019, sung by Soham Naik with music by Shivang Mathur. In April 2025, Zee Music Company released Sukoon Hai, which he wrote and composed, sung by Shivang Mathur. He appears in both videos.
The distinction worth noting is that this is not a celebrity who monetised fame into a company. It is someone who built a company first and used it to buy the right to say no to work he did not want.
Aao Chalo · Sukoon Hai · Apple Music
5. Anuj Sawhney
Left acting entirely to run a listed company
Sawhney was born in New Delhi in 1981 and acted between 2003 and 2010, with credits including Nayee Padosan and Fun2shh. He is now Managing Director of Swiss Military Consumer Products, a company listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange.
Under him the brand has moved from a corporate gifting business into consumer lifestyle and travel gear, with reported emphasis on product innovation, retail growth, domestic manufacturing and affordable premium positioning.
He is the full version of the switch, the person who stopped acting and became an operator. Worth including precisely because it is the outcome most of the people on this list are avoiding, and because it demonstrates that the skills are transferable in both directions.
6. Rajan Sippy
Acted in the eighties, produced a film, then moved to Dubai and stayed there
Sippy earned a Bachelor of Commerce in accounting, business and economics from H.R. College in Mumbai. He began acting with the Ramsay horror film 3D Saamri in 1985, appeared in Dak Bangla and Awara Baap, and produced Shehzaade in 1989 starring Shatrughan Sinha, Dharmendra and Dimple Kapadia.
In the 1990s he moved to Dubai. He now runs a chain of hotels and nightclubs there, is founder and managing partner of S E International LLCS, and serves as managing director of Screenplay Services Pte Ltd, based in Singapore.
Sippy is the long view on this list. A film career that lasted roughly a decade, followed by three decades of business in a different country. Whether that reads as a failure of the acting or an escape from it depends entirely on who is telling it.
7. Kriti Sanon
The brand-extension model, included for contrast
Sanon holds a B.Tech in Electronics and Communication from Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, moved into modelling after graduating, and won a Filmfare Award for Best Female Debut for Heropanti. She has since launched a clothing line, a fitness company and a skincare brand.
She is on this list to mark the boundary. These are real ventures and she is genuinely involved, but the structure is the modern celebrity model: fame first, then a brand built on top of it, typically with a partner handling operations.
That is a different economic relationship from Shetty in a kitchen at sixteen or Gupta managing a fifty-person trading operation. Neither is better. They are just not the same thing, and the coverage tends to flatten them into one category called "actor turned entrepreneur," which is where the confusion starts.
What separates an operator from an endorser
Three tests do most of the work.
Does the payroll exist? A licensing deal has no employees. A business does. Shetty's restaurants, Pannu's events company, Gupta's fifty staff and Sawhney's listed company all involve people whose salaries depend on decisions somebody makes on a Tuesday morning. That is a materially different life from approving a product photo.
Does it survive the fame going away? A celebrity skincare brand is a bet on continued relevance. A trading firm, a hotel chain or an architecture practice is not. Sippy's Dubai businesses have outlasted his acting career by three decades, which was presumably the point.
Which one funds which? This is the interesting one. For most people here the acting funded the business. For Gupta it runs the other way, which changes the relationship to the work entirely. When the day job pays the bills, turning down a role is a preference rather than a financial event.
Why nobody talks about it this way
There is a reason the coverage flattens all of this into one shape.
An actor with a skincare line is easy to write about. There is a product, a launch, a photograph and a press release. An actor who runs a trading operation in Lucknow or a restaurant group in Mumbai produces none of that. The business generates invoices, not press.
There is also a status question nobody says out loud. In Indian entertainment, being seen as a businessman who acts is worse than being seen as an actor who invests. The first suggests the acting is a hobby. The second suggests the acting worked so well it generated surplus capital. The underlying activity can be identical. The framing is not.
Which means the people on this list with the most operational experience are usually the ones least interested in discussing it.
