Azim Premji and Family

Azim Premji turned a vegetable oil company into a technology giant, then gave most of the wealth back.

Premji inherited a vegetable oil company in 1966 at the age of 21. When IBM exited India in the late 1970s under pressure from the government's foreign exchange regulations, he moved the company into computing. Wipro grew through the subsequent decades into one of India's largest IT services businesses, with over 240,000 employees serving clients across the world. The pivot from cooking oil to software is often cited as opportunism, but it was also a sustained bet on Indian engineering talent at a point when that talent had few large domestic employers willing to deploy it at scale.

Premji signed the Giving Pledge in 2013 and has since transferred the majority of his personal wealth to the Azim Premji Foundation, making him the largest individual philanthropist in India by committed amount. The Foundation works inside the government school system across multiple Indian states, training teachers alongside state education departments rather than building parallel private institutions.