Zscaler CTO Amit Sinha funds PhD fellowship at MIT
Deepali Preeti and Amit Sinha
October 30, 2021
This week, Amit Sinha, Chief Technology Officer of Zscaler, and his wife Deepali Preeti Sinha established a presidential fellowship for international graduate students in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Sinha, 45-years-old, told MIT’s Technology Review that he “would not have been able to attend MIT without the financial aid…Because of my time at MIT, I had the training and opportunity to work with some of the smartest people throughout my career.” Plus, getting a degree from MIT, makes “my friends and colleagues think I’m smarter than I actually am.”
MIT’s five-year electrical engineering graduate program, which has 700 PhD students, is the largest doctoral program among its engineering schools. There is no mention of how many Ph.D. students will be funded each year by the Sinha fellowship. Also undisclosed is the total amount gifted to MIT by the Sinhas so far.
Amit Sinha is also Zscaler’s President of Research and Development, Operations, and Customer service. Since 2017, he has served as a member of its board of directors. Each day in over 200 countries, Zscaler’s cybersecurity software analyzes more than 190 billion transactions, extracting 300 trillion signals and detecting and blocking about 100 million threats.
Zscaler’s cloud-based software, enhanced by machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, is distributed across more than 150 data centers around the world, servicing more than 4000 clients, including 450 major companies. Siemens, for instance, uses Zscaler to secure the traffic of its 350,000 users in 185 countries. In the UK, National Health Services provides a secure online portal to more than a million patients through Zscaler.
Zscaler, which has more than 3,900 employees, was founded in 2008 by Jay Chaudhry, 63-years-old, and Kailash Kailash. In 2018, it became a public company by listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange. It has a market value of $43 billion.
Prior to Zscaler, Sinha served as the CTO of Jay Chaudhry’s previous venture AirDefense, which was acquired by Motorola. Sinha stayed on as CTO of Motorola’s enterprise networking and communications business before teaming up again with Chaudhry at Zscaler in 2010. Sinha also served as the Chief Technologist at Engim, which he co-founded.
Sinha earned an MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. At IIT he was awarded the President of India Gold Medal. Sinha holds 27 US patents and has contributed to several books and dozens of conference and journal papers.
Sinha and his family members own Zscaler stock worth over $226 million. His net worth is likely much higher since he has sold stock and earns a sizeable annual income and bonus. In fiscal year 2020, for instance, Zscaler paid Sinha $55 million, inclusive of salary, bonus and stock compensation.
MIT attracts smart, passionate folks and gives them an opportunity to socialize with others who are also curious and driven to solve hard problems, Zscaler’s Sinha notes. He hopes the fellowship he set up at MIT, with his wife Deepali, can remove the financial hurdle for international students and allow them to realize their dream of studying at MIT.
“I’d love to see how these young engineers supported by our fellowship go out in the world and make a big difference,” Sinha told MIT’s Technology Review. “Perhaps they will turn around and set up fellowships for subsequent generations.”
So far, the biggest donation by an Indian to MIT, or by any Indian American to philanthropic causes, came from the late Amar Bose. He was an inventor who passed away in 2013 at the age of 83. He held numerous patents in acoustics, electronics and other fields, invented noise-cancelling headphones, the wave radio and an innovative suspension system for cars. Bose got his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. from MIT, all in electrical engineering. He then taught at MIT for 45 years.
Bose Corp., the private company he founded, supplied high-quality speakers used in the Sistine Chapel in Italy, the Grand Mosque in Mecca and other public spaces and auditoriums as well as in homes and in Mercedes Benz, Porsche and other luxury cars. “I never went into business to make money. I went into business so that I could do interesting things that hadn’t been done before,”Bose told an interviewer from Popular Science magazine, in 2004.
In 2011, Bose donated a majority of the shares in Bose Corp to MIT, without any publicity. The exact number of shares donated has not been disclosed. In 2019, Bose Corp. had $4 billion in estimated revenues, according to Forbes. Based on the purchase price paid for a rival speaker company, Bose Corp. can be conservatively estimated to have a value of $5 billion. So, Bose’s donation to MIT is at least worth more than $3 billion.
“I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by M.B.A.’s,” Bose told Popular Science. “Without character and integrity, you can make a lot of money, but I don’t think you can be proud of it.”
