Minal Mehta

Minal Mehta is a dancer, choreographer, and dance-fitness entrepreneur who helped build BollyX, a Bollywood-inspired workout program that brought Indian dance vocabulary into scalable group instruction. Her path bridged multiple dance worlds: she choreographed synchronized-swimming routines while participating in Bollywood stage productions, and trained in Bollywood, Kathak, Indian folk, jazz, and hip-hop. At UC Berkeley, where she graduated in 2005 with a BA in economics with honors, she led the collegiate Bollywood dance team during a season when the group swept national competitions. After earning an MBA in general management from Harvard Business School in 2011, Mehta applied that dual training—artistic and analytical—to a new venture. In 2013, she co-founded BollyX alongside Shahil Patel, Mayuri Bhandari, Fen Tung, and Brent Lagerman, developing a 50-minute interval-based workout built from dynamic choreography and music from South Asian popular culture. The company's structure reflected Mehta's conviction that participants should experience themselves as performers, not merely repeat exercises, while instructors received a repeatable, teachable framework. By 2016, BollyX had trained more than 2,000 instructors across 30 U.S. states, expanding access to Bollywood-inspired movement for broad audiences while maintaining connection to performance energy and cultural context.