Infosys
More info
- Creator
- N. R. Narayana Murthy et al.
- Released
- 1981
- Type
- IT services company
Seven engineers in Pune with borrowed seed money who proved software could be built on the other side of the planet.
Founded in 1981 by N. R. Narayana Murthy and six colleagues, Nandan Nilekani among them. Murthy borrowed the 10,000 rupees of starting capital from his wife, Sudha. The company moved to Bangalore (Bengaluru) and built what became known as the global delivery model: the client in the US specifies the work, developers in India build it while America sleeps, and the code is waiting the next morning.
In 1999 Infosys became the first Indian company listed on Nasdaq, just as the millennium date bugs in ageing COBOL systems handed the whole industry more work than it could take on. Along with TCS and Wipro, it turned Bengaluru into a tech city. Nilekani later left to build Aadhaar, India's biometric ID registry.