Anand Deshpande and Family

Persistent Systems built its IT services business around engineering software products, not managing infrastructure. That positioning proved its value when AI changed what clients needed.

Anand Deshpande founded Persistent Systems in Pune in 1990, at the beginning of the period when Indian software engineers were first being systematically hired for offshore development work by American technology companies. He built the company with a focus on product engineering services, helping technology companies build and maintain software products, which positioned Persistent in a more technically intensive part of the IT services value chain than the business process and infrastructure management work that dominated many larger Indian firms.

Persistent has grown into a $1.3 billion company with over 24,000 employees, having reoriented in recent years toward cloud engineering, AI services and digital transformation. The DeAsra Foundation, which the Deshpande family established, works with small and micro entrepreneurs across Maharashtra, providing mentorship, training and financing access. The foundation's focus on the informal economy reflects an awareness that the high-skilled IT services sector in which Persistent operates serves a very different segment of India's working population than the hundreds of thousands of small businesses that need different forms of support.