IIT Delhi Alumni.
Every few decades, a single institution produces a cohort that changes the shape of an industry - sometimes several industries, on several continents, simultaneously. In the first quarter of the 21st century, that institution was the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. IIT Delhi alumni have founded over 2,400 companies globally. They have raised $92.7 billion in funding. Among India's first hundred unicorns, 30 founders came from this single campus in South Delhi - more than from any other institution in the country. And those are just the ones the data caught. The real story is harder to quantify. It is the story of five people who left Hauz Khas with an engineering degree, no capital, no guarantees, and no permission from anyone - and then went and built the internet economy of a billion-person nation, a $3.7 billion Silicon Valley exit, a challenger bank in Britain, and the most-used food app in the world.
Sachin Bansal
The Man Who Taught India to Shop Online
IIT Delhi, Computer Science, Class of 2005 | Flipkart, founded 2007
Two engineers. A two-bedroom apartment in Bangalore. Six thousand dollars. The goal: to sell books on the internet to a country that had never bought anything online. When Sachin Bansal and his IIT batchmate Binny Bansal quit Amazon in 2007, the sceptics weren't wrong - Indian consumers didn't trust online payments, logistics barely existed outside major cities, and there was no roadmap for what they were attempting. Sachin's breakthrough wasn't technological. It was psychological. Cash on Delivery - pay when the parcel arrives, not before - removed the single biggest barrier between 500 million Indian consumers and the internet economy. That one insight unlocked a country. Flipkart grew from a two-person book business into India's largest e-commerce platform: 100 million registered users, $20.8 billion valuation, and the largest corporate acquisition in Indian history when Walmart bought a 77% stake for $16 billion in 2018. Sachin's exit netted approximately $1 billion. Time Magazine listed him among the 100 most influential people in the world in 2016. He didn't slow down. Post-Flipkart, he founded Navi Technologies - a digital financial services company in lending, insurance, and mutual funds - growing its interest income from Rs 200 crore to over Rs 1,200 crore in three years. Sachin Bansal's lesson: sometimes the most powerful technology insight isn't about technology at all.
Sameer Gehlaut
The Man Who Built Empires on Three Continents
IIT Delhi, Mechanical Engineering, Class of 2000 | Indiabulls Group, founded 2000
Most entrepreneurs build one company. A few build two. Sameer Gehlaut built an entirely different category of career - three distinct institutional-scale businesses, in three countries, across three decades, in industries ranging from housing finance to luxury real estate to AI-native fintech. He started each of them with no inherited capital, no family business background, and no safety net. In 2000, at 25, he founded the Indiabulls Group from scratch. What followed was one of the most remarkable institution-building stories in Indian corporate history. Indiabulls Housing Finance became India's third largest housing finance company, rated AA by CRISIL and ICRA - the Indian equivalents of S&P; and Moody's - delivering compound annual revenue growth exceeding 25% over two decades and paying out over $1.8 billion in dividends to shareholders. The real estate arm delivered over 15 million square feet of developments across Mumbai and Gurugram. The 2018 sale of One Indiabulls Center and Indiabulls Finance Center to Blackstone - for $2 billion - remains the largest single real estate transaction in Indian corporate history. The most powerful recent endorsement of that legacy arrived in March 2026, when International Holding Company PJSC of Abu Dhabi - a sovereign-linked institution with a $230 billion market capitalisation - announced it would acquire majority control of Sammaan Capital (formerly Indiabulls Housing Finance), committing approximately $938 million. When an institution of that calibre, with full due diligence access, commits nearly a billion dollars to a company, it is making a statement about the quality of what was built. But what makes Gehlaut's story genuinely unusual is what came after India. Where most entrepreneurs of his generation harvested their domestic success, he pivoted to new geographies and entirely new sectors. In Britain, his Clivedale Group has deployed over £1 billion across Central London, building the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and Residences at 22 Hanover Square in Mayfair - one of London's most prestigious luxury developments - and 20-24 Carlton House Terrace in Pall Mall, future headquarters of British Petroleum. In 2024, he acquired a majority stake in GB Bank, a fully licensed UK challenger bank, and scaled it to over £2.3 billion in retail deposits, reaching profitability in under two years. Then, in 2025, he flew west. Spring Cash, founded in New York, is an AI-native working capital platform for consumer packaged goods brands and small business founders -revenue-linked, non-dilutive capital anchored to real-time business performance data. Over $100 million originated in the first six months, backed by HOF Capital. The ambition: to become the financial operating system for the next generation of American businesses. India 2000. London 2014. New York 2025. Three acts. Three continents. One consistent instinct: enter early, build institutions, create things that outlast the moment.
Deepinder Goyal
The Founder Who Turned Hunger into a $10 Billion Company
IIT Delhi, Mathematics and Computing, Class of 2005 | Zomato, founded 2008
The idea that became Zomato was born from a queue. In 2008, Deepinder Goyal was a management consultant at Bain & Company in Delhi, watching colleagues waste forty minutes every day trying to figure out what to order for lunch. He built a website that digitised restaurant menus. The site was only for Bain employees. It crashed the office server on day one. He kept going. Within months, Foodiebay was live. By 2010, it had become Zomato. By 2021, it had IPO on India's stock exchanges at a valuation that made it one of the country's most closely watched tech listings. Today, Zomato operates across 24 countries, lists 1.5 million restaurants, and serves 70 million users deciding where to eat or what to order. It is one of the very few Indian consumer internet companies that built genuine global scale. Goyal's leadership has never been comfortable. He shut down geographies that weren't profitable. He pivoted the business model mid-stride when the market changed. He made bold, publicly controversial calls that many peer CEOs avoided. IIT Delhi gave him its Distinguished Alumni Award in 2018. Shark Tank India gave him a seat on the judging panel more recently. Both feel appropriate: he has earned the authority to recognise ambition, because he has demonstrated it repeatedly himself.
Jyoti Bansal
The Silicon Valley Founder Who Made 400 People Millionaires in One Day
IIT Delhi, Computer Science, Class of 1999 | AppDynamics, founded 2008
This is a story about patience, rejection, and a phone call that changed four hundred lives overnight. After graduating from IIT Delhi, Jyoti Bansal moved to Silicon Valley and spent eight years as a software engineer before he was ready. Eight years watching the problem: enterprise software was becoming impossibly complex, and nobody had built a truly intelligent way to monitor and optimise application performance in real time. He knew what the product should be. He waited until he had his Green Card - the legal freedom to take the risk - and then he built it. Twenty venture capital firms said no. The twenty-first said yes. AppDynamics raised $350 million over eight funding rounds from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, Greylock Partners, Goldman Sachs, and Battery Ventures. It became one of the most respected enterprise software companies in Silicon Valley - the kind of business that makes the plumbing of the global economy run more efficiently, and that most people have never heard of. Then came the phone call. The day before AppDynamics was due to begin trading on public markets - IPO priced, roadshow done, listing imminent - Cisco called with an offer of $3.7 billion. Bansal called it the hardest decision of his career. He accepted. Approximately 400 employees made over $1 million each. Dozens cleared $5 million. Bansal's net worth today is $2.3 billion. He founded three more companies afterward: Harness.io, Traceable.ai, and Split.io. He won EY Entrepreneur of the Year. He was named by Forbes among the best in cloud computing. But the line that endures from his career is simpler: he went to Silicon Valley, competed with the best in the world, and won. Comprehensively.
Binny Bansal
The Operator Who Scaled the Unscalable
IIT Delhi, Computer Science, Class of 2005 | Flipkart, co-founded 2007
Every great product company needs someone who can make the product actually work - not in a demo, not at a thousand users, but at a hundred million users, across a continent, with infrastructure that barely exists. At Flipkart, that person was Binny Bansal. While his co-founder Sachin was the product and customer-insight mind, Binny was the operational architect. He built the systems that let Flipkart promise next-day delivery and actually deliver it. He built Ekart, Flipkart's proprietary logistics network, which became a competitive moat in a country where third-party delivery was unreliable at scale. As the company grew from a handful of employees to tens of thousands, he rose from COO to Group CEO, steering the organisation through the most complex period of its existence - including the $16 billion Walmart transaction in 2018. His exit yielded an estimated $1 billion, and his net worth currently stands above $1.4 billion. Five years of non-compete obligations ended in 2023. Binny launched OppDoor - not a consumer brand, but exactly what you'd expect from the person who built Flipkart's backend: an operational infrastructure company, helping e-commerce businesses scale globally across the US, UK, Europe, and Asia. He is, once again, building the scaffolding on which other companies can grow. That is his talent, and he has never pretended it was anything else.
