Three desi kids have made their way into the second batch of 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellows.

Established by Bay Area entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook), the fellowships provide the winners with $100,000 over two years to skip college and pursue innovative scientific and technical projects, learn entrepreneurship and begin to build the innovative companies of tomorrow.

The fellows are mentored by a network of thinkers, investors, scientists, and entrepreneurs, who provide guidance and business connections.

The three Indian kids in the 2012 batch of Thiel Fellows are:

* Anand Gupta (20, Palo Alto, CA) and Tony Ho (19, San Jose, CA) are using their expertise in biology and computer science to transform the way doctors diagnose patients. Their service will enable doctors and researchers to receive quantitative analysis of biomedical images, allowing for faster, more accurate diagnoses of complex diseases – and more lives saved.

* Ritik Malhotra (19, San Jose, CA) Ritik began programming at age 8; started a popular web forum at the age of 12 that grew to over 32,000 members; and ran a web hosting and software consultancy business at the age of 13, garnering over a 600x return on his initial investment. Now he wants to provide a streamlined way of discovering, sharing, and distributing content over Facebook, Twitter, and other social media services. As a Thiel Fellow, he’ll first work to build a service that allows users to share interesting media, scraped from all around the web, focusing primarily on user growth in order to build a thriving community.

* Tara Seshan (19, New Fairfield, CT) is dedicated to improving public health worldwide, using technology, simple solutions, and community-based change. To that end, she is developing a tool that influences analysis of data, monitoring and evaluation, and public health decision making. As a Thiel Fellow, Tara will explore developing tools that enhance public health programs that can be implemented in low-resource settings.

  Anand Gupta, Peter Thiel, Ritik Malhotra, Tara Seshan, Thiel Fellows