Azim Premji

Current Company

Wipro — Founder Chairman

From Cooking Oil to Code: The Transformation of Wipro

Azim Premji's transformation of Wipro from a regional cooking oil manufacturer into one of the world's largest information technology companies is one of the most remarkable business pivots in corporate history. When Premji took over the company in 1966 at age 21 — dropping out of Stanford to return to India after his father's sudden death — Wipro was known primarily for its vegetable oils and consumer products. Premji's genius was in recognizing, earlier than almost anyone in India, that the country's English-speaking, mathematically educated workforce could become a global force in software development and IT services. He began the company's technology pivot in 1981, initially producing hardware for the Indian market, and then gradually shifting toward software services as the global outsourcing revolution began to take shape.

The scale of what Premji built is staggering: from a cooking oil company with a few hundred employees, Wipro grew into a technology firm with over 250,000 employees operating in more than 60 countries, providing IT services to some of the world's largest corporations. Premji's leadership style — famously frugal, intensely focused on quality, and deeply ethical — set the cultural tone for an organization that became known in the Indian IT industry for its integrity and its commitment to delivering on promises. At a time when many Indian companies were perceived as cutting corners, Wipro's reputation for reliability and quality became a competitive advantage that helped establish India as a credible destination for high-value technology work.

The Philanthropist Who Is Giving India's Children a Future

Premji's philanthropic commitments have been as transformative as his business achievements. Through the Azim Premji Foundation, established in 2001, he has built one of the largest and most sophisticated educational philanthropy operations in the world — not a foundation that simply writes checks to existing organizations, but one that has developed its own educational philosophy, trained tens of thousands of teachers, established a university (Azim Premji University in Bangalore), and works directly with government schools across multiple Indian states to improve the quality of education available to the country's poorest children. The foundation's approach is distinctive in its commitment to working within the public education system rather than creating parallel private institutions — a philosophical choice that reflects Premji's conviction that meaningful educational change must reach the hundreds of millions of children in government schools, not just the privileged few who can afford private education.

Premji has pledged to give away the vast majority of his wealth — commitments that have already transferred over $21 billion in Wipro shares to the foundation, making him one of the most generous philanthropists in history and by far the most generous in India. His signing of the Giving Pledge was a landmark moment for Indian philanthropy, signaling that the country's new wealth could be directed toward solving the deep structural problems — in education, healthcare, and rural development — that government alone has been unable to address. Now in his late seventies, Premji has stepped back from Wipro's day-to-day operations to focus on the foundation's work, bringing the same intensity, frugality, and long-term thinking to education reform that he brought to building one of the world's great technology companies.