Nehemiah Corporation of America
Nehemiah Corporation of America is a non-profit organization based in Sacramento, California specializing in homeownership, affordable housing and community development. It started in 1994 as a small organization, but grew to prominence later in the 1990s after it developed a program that allowed home buyers to make down payments on their purchases using funds that were derived from the home sellers. This program, the Nehemiah Program, became popular and was widely emulated, giving birth to what came to be known as the seller-funded down-payment assistance industry. The industry attracted criticism from U.S. federal agencies (particularly the Government Accountability Office and the Internal Revenue Service) and was ultimately shut down in 2008 by a change in federal law.
Chirinjeev Kathuria
In 2004, Kathuria ran for U.S. Senate in Illinois, becoming the first Indian-American and first person of the Sikh religion running for federal office in US history, in a race that included eventual winner, Barack Obama. Kathuria co-founded American Teleradiology NightHawks Inc., which was acquired in 2005 by NightHawk Radiology Holdings Inc., and the combined company went public on NASDAQ in 2006. In 2010 he co-founded New Generation Power International and, later, Veriown. Kathuria has also been involved in space exploration, and was the Founding Director of Mircorp, the first commercial company to privately launch and fund manned space programs. Kathuria also invested in Russia's Mir space station in its final days. In 2005, Chirinjeev Kathuria co-founded PlanetSpace, a privately funded Chicago-based rocket and space travel project, which bid for NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services contract with Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Alliant Techsystems.