Since the 1970s, it has been par for the course to complete an engineering undergraduate degree in India, pursue higher studies in the US and stay on to work there. Several global companies in the past decade have CEOs of Indian origin, such as Sundar Pichai at Google, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Arvind Krishna at IBM and Nikesh Arora at Palo Alto Networks, who have risen in that mould.

However, from the 1980s onward, when the personal computer industry was growing in the US, immigrants from India, such as Vinod Khosla and Kanwal Rekhi, veered towards entrepreneurship. Vinod co-founded Sun Microsystems with Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim in 1982. Kanwal co-founded Excelan, which made smart ethernet components, and went public in five years before merging with Novell.

As the telecom and internet industries took off in the US in the 1990s, immigrants from India began to try their hand at startups in growing numbers. For example, Gururaj Deshpande founded Cascade Communications in the US in 1990, which he sold to Ascend Communications after seven years. He then co-founded Sycamore Networks, which went public in October 1999 at a market cap of $18 billion (roughly `80,000 crore at the time), making him one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs of Indian origin in the US. In fact, he also bet on India well before it was fashionable, co-founding and funding Tejas Networks in 2000 along with Sanjay Nayak, to build what is arguably India’s most successful telecom startup, now part of the Tata Group.

Similarly, Junglee was founded by Rakesh Mathur, Anand Rajaraman, Venky Harinarayan and Ashish Gupta in the US in 1998, which they sold to Amazon.com for $250 million (around Rs 1,050 crore at the time).

It wasn’t uncommon any more for IIT graduates to move to the US for higher studies, work for a few years and then build a startup there. And in the past two decades, entrepreneurship has gathered further momentum among Indian immigrants in the US.

In September 2024, Indiaspora, a non-profit, and BCG released a report analysing the role of Indian immigrant-entrepreneurs in unicorn companies in the US.

It showed that first-generation immigrants – from across the world – founded 358 (or 55 per cent) of the 648 companies that became unicorns in the US between 2018 and 2023. India was the leading country of origin for immigrant founders of billion-dollar companies in the US during this time with Indian immigrants being behind 72 unicorns. The collective value of these companies exceeds $195 billion (9.4 per cent of the total), and they employ approximately 55,000 people (13 per cent of unicorn employees), according to the report.

Of these 72 unicorns, most are in enterprise technology, followed by high-impact sectors like consumer and retail, financial services and healthcare. Companies like Lacer, Carta and Rubrik had at least one founder who came from India as a student.

Rubrik founders Arvind Jain, Soham Mazumdar and Bipul Sinha studied at IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur and IIT Kharagpur, respectively, before landing in the US for their postgraduation.

In 2014, they started Rubrik as a data security platform for cyber recovery. A decade later, in April 2024, the startup went public on the NYSE at a valuation of around Rs 47,000 crore ($5.6 billion).

A more recent example is Arvind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine. Arvind studied electrical engineering at IIT Madras and then enrolled for a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2017. He went on to work at Google and OpenAI – reinforcing our thesis that many today’s founders are being shaped inside global companies – before launching Perplexity in August 2022. Just three years later, the startup was valued at Rs 1.8 lakh crore ($20 billion) in a September 2025 funding round.

Interestingly, a growing number of high-calibre Indian-origin professionals from Silicon Valley are now choosing to start up in India, drawn by the sheer scale of the opportunities here.

Take Ram Anant, founder and CEO of C2i Semiconductors. After earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Mysuru, he moved to the US to pursue a master’s degree at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He spent close to two decades there, working at companies such as AAB, Invensys and Texas Instruments (TI), before returning to Bengaluru in 2007 to lead product design and business development for TI’s power management portfolio across the Asia Pacific (APAC) region.

‘Once in India, I found that TI’s products, designed and manufactured in the US, were too expensive for the Asian market, where local competitors offered similar parts at significantly lower costs,’ Ram says. So he proposed and implemented a new design philosophy focused on developing cost-effective, high-volume power management parts tailored for the APAC market. One example was a breakthrough device for mobile phones that cost just 3 cents to produce, allowing TI to compete effectively with Taiwanese manufacturers. Over time, production costs fell further to just 1 cent.

Under Ram’s leadership, TI’s power management design centre in India grew from a three-member team to roughly 150 engineers spanning six product lines, ultimately generating billions of dollars in revenue from the region.

After nearly two decades at TI, and in search of a new challenge, Ram joined Resource Inc., an Indo–American company focused on water conservation in agriculture, as a contractor. The work involved deploying embedded power management systems with sensors to optimise irrigation based on crop type and environmental conditions, thereby helping farmers conserve water, improve yields and bring more land under cultivation.

Then, in 2023, Ram reunited with three former TI colleagues to explore the ideas he had long been unable to pursue inside a large corporation. ‘I was cooked with corporate life,’ he says. ‘Besides, I had ideas at TI that I simply couldn’t bring to fruition.’ The group registered C2i Semiconductors in 2024, bringing together more than a century of combined experience and a clear ambition: to build a globally competitive product company out of India.

C2i designs specialised semiconductors that manage how electricity flows through electronic devices. As a ‘fabless’ company, it focuses on designing analogue and mixed-signal semiconductors but outsources the actual manufacturing to specialised factories. Its products are aimed at enterprise applications such as AI infrastructure, data centres, telecommunications servers and Bitcoin mining operations – all areas where efficient power management is critical for both performance improvement and reducing energy costs. The company has already filed nine patents and 12 more are in the pipeline.

C2i’s first semiconductors taped out in May 2026. With those, the company is targeting the global power management market, currently worth more than Rs 90,000 crore ($10 billion) and growing at 15 per cent annually. Ram says, ‘We want to prove that India can produce world-class semiconductor products that the world actually wants to buy.’

Similarly, take Mohak Nahta, a Delhi native who moved to the US in 2013, at age 18, to study computer science at Carnegie Mellon. He never expected to return, given how limited the opportunities in India seemed back then. ‘The India story hadn’t materialised yet. The smartphone revolution hadn’t taken off and innovation was barely happening,’ he says.

Excerpted with permission from Juggernaut.

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