KRIS GOPALAKRISHNAN

Kris was born in Kerala in 1955. He studied physics and then computer science at IIT Madras, finishing in 1979.

In 1981 he joined Narayana Murthy and five others to start Infosys with barely any money. He spent the next 30 years building it, mostly on the technical and delivery side.

In 2007 he became CEO and managing director and ran the company through the global financial crisis. He stepped back to vice chairman in 2011 and left his executive role in 2014.

Since then he has turned to two things, funding early-stage startups and funding brain research.

Infosys is the foundation. He was a co-founder, then CEO from 2007 to 2011, then vice chairman until 2014.

Axilor Ventures is the startup accelerator he co-founded and chairs, helping young Indian companies survive their earliest, most fragile stage. Pratithi is his personal investment vehicle.

And Pratiksha Trust, run with his wife Sudha, is the philanthropy that pours money into brain science. He also helped fund the Centre for Brain Research at the Indian Institute of Science.

Through Axilor, Kris backs founders at the very start, when an idea is barely a company. The model is heavy on mentorship, not just money.

His advice is blunt. Fail fast, and spend as little as possible proving whether an idea works.

He is also a deep tech believer. He keeps saying India's next wave of big companies will come from hard science and real technology, not from copying business models that already exist elsewhere.

The win is Infosys, full stop. Seven friends started it in 1981 with about 250 dollars borrowed money.

It grew into a global company now worth tens of billions, and listed on NASDAQ in 1999. Kris's small founding stake turned into a fortune of roughly $4.3 billion.

He also ran the company as CEO through the 2008 financial crisis and kept it steady. Not bad for a physics student from Kerala who started with nothing.

Kris took over as Infosys CEO in 2007, right as the company's golden run was slowing. During and after his years in charge, Infosys was often seen as too cautious and bureaucratic.

Rivals like TCS and Cognizant grew faster and ate into its lead. The conservatism that made Infosys trustworthy also made it slow.

It is a fair knock on his era. The company that once set the pace spent years playing catch-up, and the turnaround only came under later leadership.

Build slowly and build right. Kris and the Infosys founders worked for years on below-market pay because they believed equity and patience would pay off, and it did.

He believes in strong values, frugality, and the long game. The other half of his philosophy is what to do with the money once you have it.

His answer is to give most of it away to science and education, while he is alive and paying attention, not in a will.

Kris is married to Sudha Gopalakrishnan, and the partnership is central to his second act. Their Pratiksha Trust funds the brain research together, and he named the IIT Madras brain centre after her.

They have one daughter. They are based in Bangalore.

For all the money, the family's public footprint is science and giving, not yachts and headlines.

Kris studied at college in Thiruvananthapuram before getting into IIT Madras. There he earned a master's in physics in 1977 and then a master's in computer science in 1979.

Physics first, then computing. That mix, the deep structure of the physical world plus how machines process information, is probably why he ended up obsessed with the most complex computer of all, the human brain.

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