Success does not come easy or happens overnight and the following tech giants are proof of the same. According to the IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List 2020, these are some of the richest Indian tech billionaires and if you look closely, all of them have one thing in common – years of hard work, dedication and perseverance that catapulted them closer to their dreams. Let’s take a look at their success stories, how they started and where they stand now in terms of net worth.
These are the 7 richest tech billionaires in India
1. Shiv Nadar
Founder of HCL Technologies, Shiv Nadar is one of the prominent and founding pillars of the IT scene in India and his success story is one that needs to be heard. Shiv Nadar started his entrepreneurial journey in 1976 in Delhi in a small terrace house, according to an article in Livemint. Back then, HCL (then known as Hindustan Computers Ltd) was making calculators and microprocessors. Shiv Nadar dared to dream big and with his hard work and genius mind, HCL Technologies has become the third-largest tech firm in the country, with revenue of $9.9 billion. He’s also a philanthropist who founded the Shiv Nadar Foundation with an aim to empower people and bridge the socio-economic gap.
Net worth – ₹1,58,000 crore (approx.)
2. Sunil Bharti Mittal
Sunil Bharti Mittal is the founder and chairperson of Bharti Enterprises whose Bharti Airtel has an enormous customer base of over 418 million customers. According to an article in YourStory, he started Bharti Enterprises in 1976 when he was only 18 years old. He took nearly 20,000 from his father and started the business of manufacturing bicycles, before venturing into the telecom sector in 1995. Today, his company Bharti Airtel is counted among the leading telecom companies in the world.
Net worth - ₹66,616 crore (approx.)
3. Azim Premji
“Success is achieved twice. Once in the mind and the second time in the real world,” Azim Premji once said and the success story of the philanthropist billionaire echoes the same. In 1966, Azim Premji had to leave his studies at Stanford midway, to take charge of his family business after his father’s demise. He took over his father’s cooking oil business, then known as Western India Vegetable Products and
turned it into Wipro, India’s fourth largest outsourcer by market cap with an $8.3 billion revenue, according to Forbes. Azim Premji is also a philanthropist whose foundation pledged nearly $134 million during the Covid-19 to help people affected by the pandemic.
Net worth – ₹59,954 crore (approx.)
4. Jay Chaudhry
An alumnus from IIT BHU Varanasi, Jay Chaudhry is the CEO, Chairman and founder of Zscaler, a global cloud computing information security firm. Before he founded Zscaler in 2008, he successfully ran a series of businesses such as AirDefense, CipherTrust and more. According to Forbes, Jay Chaudhry comes from a humble background and his hometown in a village in the Himalayas did not even have electricity or water during his early life (when he was in the 8th and 10th grade). Today, he’s one of the wealthiest people in California, USA and was ranked 85th in the list of Forbes 400 2020 list.
Net worth – ₹62,178 crore (approx.)
5. Vijay Shekhar Sharma
Being born to a school teacher in Aligarh, Vijay Shekhar Sharma is the founder of Paytm, a leading platform for digital payments and transactions. According to an article in Business Insider, there was a time when he only had Rs 10 in his pocket and was barely making ends meet. And things weren’t too easy during his college life at Delhi College of Engineering either, as he didn’t know how to read and write in English. However, he never lost hope, studied the language, almost went bankrupt after building his start-up and eventually overcame all obstacles to become one of the youngest self-made billionaires in India.
Net worth – ₹17,000 crore (approx.)
6. Byju Raveendran
Hailing from Azhikode, Byju Raveendran was an engineer by profession before he decided to take up teaching as a full-time career option. The idea came to him when he used to teach his friends to crack the entrance exams for the IIMs. In 2011, he founded an online teaching firm to teach the K-12 segment (students from Kindergarten to Class 12) along with his wife Divya Gokulnath. Today, Byju’s stands tall as a company valued at more than 10 billion and reaches over 57 million students across India, as per Forbes.
Net worth – ₹22,575 crore (approx.)
7. Divyank Turakhia
As per an interview in Entrepreneur, Divyank Turakhia started coding when he was only 8 years old. In 1998, at the age of 16, he founded a tech firm along with his brother Bhavin Turakhia, using a sum of 25,000. Since then, the brothers have worked on numerous tech ventures. In 2010, Divyank Turakhia founded Media.net, an online ad tech firm, which develops pioneering products for publishers and advertisers. In August 2016, he sold Media.net to a group of Chinese investors for 900 million, as per Forbes.
Net worth – ₹14,000 crore (approx.)
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GQ India