His village in Himachal Pradesh got electricity when he was 13. Running water came two years later. It was not an easy childhood, but that did not stop Jay Chaudhry from earning an engineering degree from IIT BHU and going to the US for higher studies. He worked in many large technology companies there after that. In 1995, he came to know about the internet browser Netscape and was fascinated by the world wide web. He wanted to start a company that offers cyber security solutions.
Chaudhry and his wife, Jyoti, quit their jobs and started SecureIT in 1996. He ran sales and marketing and she managed finance, human resources and operations. SecureIT was later acquired by Verisign. His second venture, AirDefense, was acquired by Motorola, and the third one, CipherTrust, was bought by Secure Computing. The fourth one, CoreHarbor, was taken over by AT&T. Chaudhry currently runs Zscaler, which offers cloud-based cyber security solutions. He founded the company in 2007 and it went public in 2018. He has a net worth of $8.1 billion, according to Forbes.
In 2000, far away from American shores, in a small apartment in the Mumbai suburb of Andheri, Pranay Agrawal, Srikanth Velamakanni, Nirmal Palaparthi, Pradeep Suryanarayan and Ramakrishna Reddy started a data analytics company called Fractal Analytics. Those were early days for AI and analytics in India and they eventually moved to the US, which already had a big AI market. Today, the New York-based company generates 70 per cent of its revenue in the US, and turned a unicorn this year, after raising $360 million from TPG Capital Asia.
Chaudhry and the founders of Fractal Analytics took different routes to the promised land, but they are all part of the long list of Indian-origin founders of US startups. Ilya Strebulaev, professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and his team studied 500 US unicorns and their 1,078 founders, and found that as many as 474 of them, or 44 per cent, were born outside the US. “A large number of unicorn founders are first-generation immigrants. Internationally, 10 countries were the birthplaces of more than 10 founders, with India, Israel and Canada as the top three, followed by the UK, China and Germany,” said Strebulaev. India topped the list with 90 startup founders.
Some of them are quite big names there. Baiju Bhatt, for instance, co-founded the commission-free stock trading app Robinhood, which became a rage during the pandemic. Or Rohan Seth, a former Google employee who co-founded the popular social audio app Clubhouse.
What’s behind so many Indians finding their feet in the US startup scene?
Indians are accepted as CEOs in America now, which was not the case even a decade ago, said Deepak Sekar, who went to the US in 2003 to do his PhD. He worked with the data storage company SanDisk after that, but soon decided to pursue his own dreams. He started Chowbotics, a food robotics firm, in 2014.
“When you look different, speak with a different accent and come from a different culture, it is not easy,” he said. “I had to learn a whole bunch of skills to be considered CEO material by investors. The emergence of high profile Indian CEOs at Google, Microsoft, IBM, Pepsi and Twitter made things easier,” he said.
Chowbotics’ first commercially released product, Sally, made salads. There were not many companies in the space at that time. In 2020, just when the Covid-19 pandemic started upending markets globally, food delivery company DoorDash acquired Chowbotics. Sekar now runs the artificial intelligence-driven e-learning company, Prof Jim, along with Pranav Mehta.
The robust growth of the startup ecosystem in India played a part in bolstering confidence in Indian entrepreneurs in the US, said Chaudhry. But the journey has been an uphill climb, involving a lot of hard work and effort. For instance, when Fractal Analytics shifted base to the US in 2005, one of its assignments from FMCG giant P&G was for just one week and worth just $2,000. “The first five years were very difficult,” said Agrawal. “It took us a while to get there.”
One of the biggest challenges was funding. Chaudhry said when he approached a venture capital firm, his business plan was rejected because he “lacked experience in creating startups”. His company, Zscaler, has clients from around the world, including Siemens, MAN Energy Solutions and AutoNation.
Most of these companies maintain a strong connection with India. A third of Zscaler’s offices, for instance, are based in India. Prof Jim’s entire research and development team is also based in India. Fractal Analytics has some 3,000 employees in India. Last year, it doubled its workforce and will add 40-50 per cent more people over the next five years. The company also works with several multinationals who have their global innovation centres in India. It has plans to go public via an IPO on the Indian stock markets.
Thousands of Indians go to the US every year to pursue higher education and work there. According to the annual report of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the number of Indian students in the US rose 12 per cent to 2,32,851 in 2021. And most of them dream of a future there.
“I had no background in entrepreneurship but I saw the opportunity to do something in the internet security space and I took it,” said Chaudhry. “It was not easy by any means, but taking these risks have led me to reap the rewards.”