The co-founder and chairman of HCL Technologies, Nadar has his very own Bill Gates story – where in 1976 he started a company in his garage which would eventually propel him to become one of India’s richest tech entrepreneurs. HCL produces calculators and microprocessors and rakes in revenue of around US$9.7 billion, making it one of India’s largest software services providers.

Sunil Bharti Mittal

Net worth: US$7.6 billion

Sunil Bharti Mittal and his family are recognised as giants in India’s telecom industry. Their company Bharti Airtel is one of the country’s largest mobile phone operators with over 418 million subscribers. Mittal is the founder and chairman of Bharti Enterprises, and also owns Airtel Payments Bank, which is controlled by billionaire Uday Kotak in a joint venture with Kotak Mahindra Bank.

Mittal’s company started selling bicycle parts in 1976, which he then sold to start a business in importing portable electric generators from Japan, but that came to a halt when the government introduced an import band. The entrepreneur then set his sights on push-button phones from Taiwan in 1984 and successfully bid for one of four mobile phone network licences auctioned in India in 1992.

Azim Premji

Net worth: US$7.2 billion

Chairman of India’s fourth-largest outsourcing company, Wipro, Azim Premji started off in his family’s cooking oil business, which after his father’s passing expanded into software. Wipro now has an innovation centre in Silicon Valley that focuses on tech R&D. His son Rishad Premji succeeded the company last July as executive chairman. A philanthropist at heart, earlier this month the tech tycoon’s Azim Premji Foundation pledged US$134 million in aid for the Covid-19 pandemic.

Jay Chaudhry

Net worth: US$3.5 billion

Chaudhry is the founder and CEO of cybersecurity firm ZScaler, which he founded in 2008. His family currently owns 45 per cent of the Nasdaq-listed firm, which went public in March 2018. Chaudhry’s global cloud-based information security company secured him in the top rankings of India’s richest tech billionaires. His first start-up, alongside his wife Jyoti Chaudhry, was cybersecurity firm SecureIT. He subsequently launched other tech companies such as CoreHarbor, CipherTrust and AirDefense. All four companies have since been acquired.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma

Net worth: US$2.3 billion

Sharma founded of India’s mobile wallet Paytm in 2011. It is India’s first home-grown mobile payments company, which received an investment injection from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway of around US$300 million in August 2018. The company services up to 400 million users and processes 20 million transactions a day. The self-made billionaire also established e-commerce platform Paytm Mall and Paytm Payments Bank.

Bhavin and Divyank Turakhia

Net worth: US$1.5 billion

The Turakhia brothers founded a tech consulting firm back in 1996, while still teenagers, from their home in Mumbai. Bhavin and Divyank went on to launch several tech companies which they sold in 2013 to US-based web-hosting firm, Endurance International. In August 2016, they sold their ad tech company, Media.net for US$900 million to a consortium of Chinese investors, with Divyank still part of the operation under this new ownership. The brothers still own a number of companies spanning cloud computing, web hosting, e-payments and online advertising.

Kavitark Ram Shriram

Net worth: US$2.2 billion

A founding member at Google, Shriram has sold most of his stock but continues to be part parent company, Alphabet’s board membership. He previously worked for tech companies such as Junglee, Netscape and Amazon. He started investing in tech start-ups through his company, Sherpalo Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in disruptive technologies.

As Asia’s most-moneyed make their mark on the global stage, in this Crazy Rich Asians series, we chart the rise of the region’s richest families, most inventive entrepreneurs – and how they spend their epic wealth.

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