N.R. Narayana Murthy and Family

Narayana Murthy co-founded Infosys with a principle that the company should be transparent, meritocratic and governable from the start. That was unusual in 1981.

Murthy co-founded Infosys in 1981 with six colleagues, many of whom went on to become significant public figures in India's technology industry. The company's founding was an act of deliberate institution-building as much as entrepreneurship: the founders wanted to demonstrate that an Indian software company could be run with transparent accounting, meritocratic management and governance standards comparable to the best international firms, ambitions that were unusual in the India of 1981 and that shaped the company's culture through its formative decades.

Infosys is now a company with $18 billion in revenues and over 300,000 employees. Murthy stepped down from active management over a decade ago. His wife Sudha Murty has become independently significant as a philanthropist, author and public figure; his son Rohan Murty runs Catamaran Ventures; and his daughter Akshata Murty is known through her marriage to the UK's former Prime Minister. The Infosys Foundation, which Sudha Murty ran for many years, has invested in rural libraries, healthcare infrastructure and educational facilities with a specificity and personal involvement that distinguishes it from most corporate foundations of comparable size.