Indians in the USA have founded companies worth more than $430 billion
Jay Singh, founder Quantumscape
November 24, 2021
In the United States, Indians have founded or co-founded at least 60 medium and large companies with an estimated total market value of more than $430 billion, according to a study by Global Indian Times. The figure includes public companies with a collective stock market value of $320 billion, private businesses with an estimated value of $72 billion and enterprises that were sold.
The companies employ more than 130,000 in mostly high paying jobs, primarily in the U.S. Immigrant and first-generation Indian Americans have also founded several thousand small private businesses, including doctor and dentist practices, motels, gas stations and stores selling snacks, cold drinks, cigarettes and vaping products.
The Indian founders of medium and large companies have earned lucrative financial rewards, with a combined value of more than $55 billion, mainly in the form of ownership stakes in their companies. Their total net worth is far higher due to income from previous sales of stocks and companies and large annual salaries and bonuses.
Brilliant team member
“I was fascinated by the internet…My family had no history of entrepreneurship. But in the mid-1990s, as the internet was just taking off…I asked myself: Why can’t I do a startup?” Jagtar (Jay) Chaudhry told students at IIT Benares Hindu University (BHU), India.
Like Chaudhry, 63-years-old, many of the founders are serial entrepreneurs. He started and led AirDefense, a wireless security pioneer, which he sold to Motorola; then, together with his wife Jyoti, he founded SecureIT which was acquired by Verisign in 1998; and CipherTrust, an email security gateway business he set up in 2000, was sold to Secure Computing in 2006.
In 2007, Chaudhry co-founded Zscaler, with Kailash Kailash, a BHU classmate, who Chaudhry told the students is “a brilliant computer scientist, and exactly the person who could help me realize my vision for transforming the security industry.”. Based in San Jose, California, Zscaler offers a cloud-based cybersecurity software system. It has a public market value of $51 billion and lists 3,800 employees on its LinkedIn page.
Chaudhry earned an MBA in Marketing, MS in Computer Engineering and MS in Industrial Engineering – all from the University of Cincinnati. He earned his Bachelor of Technology in Electronics Engineering from BHU. With a net worth of $21 billion, according to Forbes, Chaudhry is the richest Indian American.
Founders, not CEOs
Like Chaudhry, many of the Indian entrepreneurs in the U.S. are engineers who founded companies in California’s Silicon Valley. Also, as with Chaudhry at Zscaler, most Indian entrepreneurs teamed up with colleagues to co-found companies. For instance, in 2014, Neha Narkhede joined Jay Kreps and Jun Rao, co-workers at LinkedIn, to co-found Confluent. Based in Mountain View, California. Confluent’s platform acts as a central nervous system enabling companies to connect and access data from all their business operations software in order to react and respond in real-time.
Narkhede, 37-years-old, served as Confluent’s chief technical and product officer till 2020. She is a member of the board of directors and owns stock worth an estimated $160 million. She earned a B.E. in computer science from Pune University and an MS in Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta.
In 2006, Enphase was co-founded by Raghuveer (Raghu) Belur, 53-years-old, and Martin Fornage, 57, engineers who met while working at Cerent, now part of networking company Cisco. Based in Fremont, California, Enphase designs, develops, manufactures, and sells semiconductor-based solar energy solutions for homes. Enphase, with a market value of $38 billion, has 2,100 employees. While Belur serves as chief product officer, Badrinarayanan Kothandaraman, another Indian American, is the chief executive.
Belur earned a BS in electronics engineering from Bangalore University in 1989, an M.S. in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University in 1993 and, while working at Enphase, an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009.
Captain of industry
“We face a global challenge to design, build and retool the electric infrastructure to combat climate change and also expand economic opportunity,” notes K.R. Sridhar on Bloom Energy’s website. Sridhar started Bloom, which is based in San Jose, California. It’s electro-chemical fuel cells are steel boxes which convert natural gas into electricity, with high heat but no combustion. Called servers, the boxes do emit carbon dioxide. But their emissions of nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide and other harmful smog particulates are negligible since there is no combustion, according to the company.
Sridhar received his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Madras, now called NIT, Trichy, India; a master’s degree in Nuclear Engineering and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, both from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Like Sridhar, other Indians are among the Americans pursuing highly advanced technologies with the goal of creating major businesses. In 2018, Amar Hanspal founded Bright Machines, based in San Francisco. It provides software-based “industrial automation platform…(that) allows even the most traditional manufacturing companies to quickly and easily deploy flexible automation solutions at scale,” said Hanspal in a statement. The platform enables manufacturers to cut costs and improve productivity and quality in assembly, testing, and inspection.
Earlier, Hanspal served as co-CEO of Autodesk, a vendor of design software with a market value of $55 billion. Bright has more than 500 employees, including about 150 software engineers. It has research and development centers in the U.S. and Israel, and field operations in the US, Mexico, China, and Poland. Hanspal, who grew up in Mumbai, was on the cricket team at the Don Bosco High School.
In 2010, Hari Balakrishnan, Sam Madden and Bill Powers co-founded Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT), as a spinoff from the CarTel Project they started in 2004 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). CMT says it is modernizing the automobile insurance business by enabling insurers to identify and reward “safe drivers.” While the chief technology officer at CMT, Balakrishnan is also the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at MIT. Before CMT, he co-founded a data analytics firm StreamBase, which was acquired by TIBCO, and was a founding advisor to Meraki, which was bought by Cisco.
Balakrishnan earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1998. He holds a B.S. in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras 1993. He graduated from the Kendriya Vidyalaya high school in New Delhi in 1989.
In 2010, serial entrepreneur Jagdeep (Jay) Singh (in photo) founded Quantumscape, a San Jose, California based company that is developing solid-state lithium batteries for electric vehicles. Its technology addresses “the single largest cost component and deficiency of electric cars, the battery,” Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, an investor, said in a statement. “By enabling greater range and much faster charge times…(the) technology will assist EVs in becoming significantly more competitive with traditional internal combustion engine vehicles, paving the way for greater adoption and a greener future.”
The batteries, being developed by a team of 200 scientists and engineers, will be available in 2025. Quantumscape, which currently has no revenues, has a market value of $15 billion. Shares owned by Singh, 53-years-old, are worth $1.1 billion. In 1999, he told the MIT Technology Review that he plans to switch from an entrepreneur to captain of industry - building a company that will be a "lasting piece of the economy."
Founders to CEOs
“We're heads down trying to change healthcare in this country – it's a lofty goal but healthcare is too complex, costly and doesn't get the outcomes we all deserve,” says Rajeev (Raj) Singh on Accolade’s website. Singh is the CEO of the company, based near Philadelphia, which helps large companies control their medical expenses by providing employees and their family members a single platform for their health, healthcare, and related benefits needs. The platform, which uses cloud-based intelligent technology, offers phone, mobile and online guidance from nurses, physicians and behavioral health specialists, coordinated by a health assistant.
Accolade has more than 1,000 employees. It has a public market value of $2.1 billion and Singh owns shares worth $84 million. Earlier, in 1993, Singh co-founded Concur, a Seattle-based travel and expense management firm. In 2014, Concur, which had $800 million in annual revenues, was acquired by German software vendor SAP for $8.3 billion. The next year, Singh took over as CEO of Accolade,
Like Singh, other entrepreneurs who have founded companies, moved into CEO roles at other companies. For instance, Francis deSouza co-founded and was CEO of Flash Communications, a provider of corporate instant messaging. It was acquired by Microsoft in 1998 for an undisclosed price. He then co-founded and was CEO of IMLogic, a vendor of protection software. It was bought by Symantec reportedly for $91 million in 2006.
In 2013, deSouza joined Illumina as president and, three years later, was appointed CEO. Illumina sells machines and chemicals for DNA sequencing and array-based solutions used in the research and analysis of samples and data to identify genetic variations. These are used in oncology, life sciences, reproductive health, genetic disease, agriculture, microbiology, and other areas by pharmaceutical, biotechnology, academic, government, and other institutions around the globe. Illumina, with around 7,800 global employees, has a market value of $59 billion. deSouza owns stock worth an estimated $200 million.
Both deSouza and Raj Singh, as well as Kothandaraman of Enphase, are among the Indian CEO’s who run medium and large companies in the U.S. with a market value of $6 trillion, according to a Global Indian Times study.
Drugs from plants
Like Raj Singh and Francis deSouza, several Indian entrepreneurs are attracted to medical businesses. In 2014, Vivek Garipalli co-founded Clover Health, based in Franklin, Tennessee, which offers medical insurance coverage. It uses software to aggregate millions of health data points, including insurance claims, medical charts and diagnostics. Then, with machine learning systems, it synthesizes the data with patient information to enable doctors to offer suggestions for medications, dosages, tests and other procedures to improve health outcomes and reduce costs.
Clover has a market value of $2.4 billion and Garipalli, 43-years-old, owns stock worth an estimated $480 million. Like his parents, immigrant doctors from India, Garipalli originally planned to go to medical school. He took pre-medical courses at Emory University, Atlanta, but switched and earned a B.B.A. in Entrepreneurship.
In 2019, Viswa Colluru, 37-years-old, founded Boulder, Colorado based Enveda to combine recent advances in automation, machine learning, and metabolomics, which is the large-scale study of small molecules within cells. His goal is to develop drugs from medicinal plants, based on an enormous untapped library of unique drug-like chemicals which are found in the plants. A private company, Enveda raised $51 million in a funding round in June this year.
Legal trouble: 66 months in prison
John Nath Kapoor “has made a habit of founding companies and allowing them to push legal and ethical limits, confident of his ability to clean up the resulting mess. Insys is just the latest chapter,” according to a 2016 Forbes report.
In 2017, Kapoor and six other executives of Insys, based in Chandler, Arizona, were charged with conspiring to bribe doctors to get them to prescribe Subsys, Insys’ fentanyl-based cancer medication, to non-cancer patients. Popularly referred to as an opioid spray, Subsys is 80 times more potent than morphine and was approved for use only to treat cancer patients with severe pain.
Many of the doctors prescribing the opioid spray operated pain clinics. More than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in the year ended April 2021, nearly a third higher than during the previous year. Three quarters of the deaths resulted from opioid overdoses. The opioid addiction and related deaths are a major medical crisis, as well as a big political issue, in the U.S.
Earlier for five years, in part due to owning 70% of Insys stock, Kapoor was among the billionaires on the Forbes list. In 2018, for instance, the magazine listed his net worth as $1.8 billion. Born in Amritsar, India, Kapoor was the first one in his family to go to college. In 1972, he earned a Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry from the State University of New York, Buffalo.
In 2020, Kapoor was sentenced to 66 months in prison.
Switching from pre-medical courses to English
Baiju Prafulkumar Bhatt, 36-years-old co-founder of Robinhood, is a first generation Indian American. He grew up in Poquoson, a small town in Virginia. His parents are immigrants from Gujarat, India.
Robinhood, an online stock trading platform based in Menlo Park, California, has a market value of $25 billion and employs more than 3,700. “Through Robinhood, millions of everyday people have started investing in the stock market for the first time. They’re nurses, Army veterans, teachers, students, and small business owners,” Bhatt and co-founder Vlad Tenev said in a statement. Bhatt and Tenev met while studying at Stanford University.
Nirav Tolia, 49-years-old, co-founder of Nextdoor, grew up in Odessa, a town which is the hub of the oil and gas industry in West Texas. Nextdoor is a social media platform which enables people to connect to their neighbors to hold parties, report lost pets, find babysitters, borrow tools, sell couches, post information on crime; get updates from police, fire and other local public services; and buy from local businesses.
Nextdoor has a market value of $5.6 billion and has roughly 800 employees. Tolia’s stake in the public company is worth an estimated $430 million. He majored in English literature from Stanford University. He also took pre-medical courses since he originally wanted to become a doctor, like his immigrant parents from India.
Niraj Shah is among the first generation Indian American entrepreneurs. In 2002, he co-founded an online platform which evolved into Wayfair.com. More than 16,000 vendors sell 30 million products via the platform, including chairs, tables, sofas, carpets, dishes, coffee mugs and other home furnishings and housewares. Wayfair, which has a market value of $29 billion, has 16,000 employees. Shah, 47-years-old, was born in the U.S.; his parents are Indian immigrants.
Lucky kids
Like Shah’s Wayfair, several enterprises set up by Indians are users of technology, not selling technology products. For instance, in 2011, Manish Chandra, Gautam Golwala, Chetan Pungaliya and Tracy Sun,.co-founded Poshmark, which has a market value of $1.5 billion. The retail platform enables sellers in the U.S. and Canada to find buyers online for apparel, handbags, shoes and jewelry they may have used. Chandra, who is the CEO, owns Poshmark stock worth an estimated $110 million. He holds an M.B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas, Austin, and a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.
in 2014, Vinit Bharara co-founded New York based Some Spider Studios, which runs web-based entertainment channels Scary Mommy and CAFÉ. In July this year, Spider was sold to BDG, an online media company, for $150 million in BDG stock.
Vinit Bharara also co-founded Café Studios, with his older brother Preet Bharara, a former federal prosecutor. Preet and Vinit’s father is a doctor and their mother worked in the office, while also raising the brothers. On December 8, 2020, Vinit tweeted “We are lucky kids,” while retweeting this post from Preet Bharara: “55 years ago today, these two kids got married in Ghaziabad, India. The groom is 26. The bride is 19. Happy Anniversary, Mom & Dad.”
Earlier in 2005, Vinit Bharara, 50-years-old, joined Marc Lore in co-founding Quidsi.com. The New Jersey based online retailer of diapers, soaps and other consumer goods faced an intense price war launched by Amazon. In 2010, Lore and Bharara sold Quidsi to Amazon for more than $545 million. Amazon shut down Quidsi in 2017. Vinit is a graduate in political science from the University of Pennsylvania, 1993, and earned a law degree from Columbia University in 1996.
in 2016, serial entrepreneur Amol Sarva co-founded New York based Knotel, a flexible office workspace company. It raised $560 million to grow its business, including $400 million in 2019, according to CrunchBase.
Knotel rapidly expanded around the globe to twelve cities besides New York, including Boston, San Francisco, London. Paris, Amsterdam and Toronto. At one point it leased over five million square feet of office space from building owners in 200 locations on four continents. In February this year, the U.S. operations of Knotel filed for bankruptcy.
OK to fail
“It was a total failure,” Vivek Garipalli, co-founder of Clover Health, told Emorywire, speaking about a start-up he founded in 1999. He had abandoned his studies at Emory University in his senior year to start the business with a friend. “It was like nine different things. We were going to build websites for small businesses, and …we were going to be an eBay for services.“ After the business attempt collapsed, he went back to Emory to finish his degree. “You can’t let past failures make you freeze,” added Garipalli. “What you want to do is just be able to make a better decision…(Some failures) might be bigger and more spectacular, more visible failures, but you'll be learning bigger and more spectacular lessons along the way.”
Many other Indian founders similarly failed with their enterprises. Apoorva Mehta, for instance, failed at 20 businesses, including building a social network for lawyers, within two years after leaving a job at Amazon in 2010 and co-founding Instacart in 2012. Based in San Francisco, Instacart, an online grocery and food delivery service, has partnered with more than 700 retailers to deliver from more than 65,000 stores across more than 5,500 cities in the U.S. and Canada. In March this year, at its latest funding round, the private company was valued at $39 billion. Mehta, 36-years-old, has a net worth of $3.5 billion, according to Forbes.
Speaking of his five start-ups, three of which failed, Raghu Belur, co-founder of Enphase said he read, that in the U.S., unlike in India, “If you accept the fact that you’re going to fail, it frees you up to succeed...In Silicon Valley when you say you failed a number of times, they look at you and say, ‘Wow, you’re really experienced.’” So Belur offers three insights: It’s ok to fail; it’s ok to take risks since you want to do things that are transformational, not incremental; and focus - “you want to be very crystal clear what problem you are solving. Once you figure out what problem you are solving, you can put an incredible amount of energy behind that.”
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