In post-independence India, the Tatas, Birlas, and Ambanis were the super rich with their big, diversified, family-owned businesses. The advent of the IT revolution in the nineties and emergence of India as the backoffice of the world brought in a new breed led by Azim Premji, Shiv Nadar, and NR Narayana Murthy of Wipro, HCL, and Infosys.
This year, for the first time, two of India’s tech startup heroes – Binny Bansal and Sachin Bansal, co-founders of ecommerce leader Flipkart – make the cut. In a list of the top 100 billionaires of India put out by Forbes, there are eight tech moguls from India. Here they are, in descending order of billions in net worth:
Azim Premji of Wipro
Net worth: US$15.9 billion
Azim Premji is the founder of IT services company Wipro, one of India’s largest publicly-traded companies. He is third on the overall list of Indian billionaires. Wipro’s market capitalization is around US$35 billion, making it the seventh largest IT services firm in the world. Azim Premji took over the reins of the company after his father’s death in 1966. A 21-year-old then, he was a student at Stanford University in the US. He pivoted the company towards IT and computing in the late seventies. Today, Wipro also has a US$100 million venture capital fund. Azim Premji’s son Rishad heads it.
Shiv Nadar
Net worth: US$12.9 billion
Shiv Nadar is the co-founder of the HCL Group, which owns IT firm HCL Technologies. A publicly-traded IT services company, HCL Technologies has a market capitalization of US$22.1 billion. Recently, Shiv Nadar co-founded a US$500 million fund for startups and healthcare tech companies. He stands sixth on the list of Indian billionaires.
N. R. Narayana Murthy
Net worth: US$1.9 billion
S. Gopalakrishnan
Nandan Nilekani
Binny Bansal and Sachin Bansal
K. Dinesh
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