Hello and welcome to TOI Bharat Abroad.
What if the next great Indian college has no degree, the next billion-dollar startup has an Indian founder, and two of the biggest names in AI have Indian-origin CTOs? This week’s edition looks at an Indian diaspora increasingly shaping what comes next, from startups and education to artificial intelligence.
So, without further ado, let’s go.
THE BIG STORY
The $560 billion diaspora startup machine
Indian unicorns
The Indian startup story does not stop at India’s borders. In fact, some of its biggest numbers are being generated thousands of kilometres away. A new Prosus-Dealroom study has identified 205 current and former unicorns abroad with at least one founder who grew up in India. Together, they represent around $560 billion in founder-attributed company value.
The newly released Indian Diaspora Index found that founders who grew up in India account for around $560 billion in founder-share-attributed value across 205 current and former unicorns outside India. The companies themselves have a combined value of about $1.1 trillion.
There is an important distinction here. The $560 billion is not the personal wealth of Indian founders. It is an estimate of company value attributed to their founders using the index’s methodology.
But even with that caveat, the number is hard to ignore.
The Big PictureIndian founders have built more than twice as many billion-dollar companies abroad as they have in India, according to the index.
The study identifies 638 founders who grew up in India behind 323 unicorns globally. Of those, 205 are current or former unicorns based outside India, while 102 are in India.
And the US is overwhelmingly where this story is being written.
About 91% of the overseas unicorns identified by the index are based in America. Cybersecurity, enterprise software, fintech and AI feature prominently among the businesses built by India-raised founders.
That makes this more than another list of successful Indian-origin executives.
These are people who left India, entered foreign markets and built companies that became significant enough to reach billion-dollar valuations.
Why it mattersFor years, the Indian diaspora story was told mainly through the language of migration.
Doctors leaving for Britain. Engineers moving to America. Students staying back after university.
The new numbers add another chapter.
Some of those migrants did not simply join companies abroad. They built them.
That complicates the old brain-drain narrative. The talent may have left India, but its economic footprint has travelled much further than a salary cheque.
There is also an interesting education story underneath the numbers. Indian institutions, particularly the IITs, continue to feature prominently in the backgrounds of founders behind these global companies.
The result is a diaspora that increasingly looks less like a workforce scattered around the world and more like a global startup network.
India’s startup ecosystem may be growing at home.
But some of its biggest success stories are still being written somewhere else.
Read full story
NRI WATCH
The desi building a college without a degree
There will be no traditional degree and the programme will focus heavily on building rather than sitting through lectures. Students will work on real-world projects, particularly around AI and entrepreneurship.
What if you could spend two years learning AI and entrepreneurship from people such as Sam Altman and Satya Nadella, without paying tuition and without getting a degree at the end?
That is the experiment being launched by Indian-origin entrepreneur Gagan Biyani, the co-founder of Udemy.
Biyani is leading the new Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a San Francisco-based alternative to traditional college backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The academy plans to take its first class in 2027 and is expected to have about 50 students.
The model is deliberately unconventional.
There will be no traditional degree and the programme will focus heavily on building rather than sitting through lectures. Students will work on real-world projects, particularly around AI and entrepreneurship.
The idea is backed by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names. The academy has received tens of millions of dollars in backing, while technology leaders and companies are involved in its founding network.
Biyani’s own story makes the experiment particularly interesting.
He co-founded Udemy, the online learning platform that grew into one of the world’s best-known education technology companies.
Now he is trying to answer a question that Silicon Valley has been asking for years:
What if the next generation of founders does not need college at all?
The experiment may be small for now.
The idea behind it is anything but.
Read full story
OFFBEAT
The two Indian CTOs who skipped IIT
Vijaye Raji, OpenAI’s CTO of Applications, found Statsig. Rahul Patil, Anthropic’s CTO, grew up in Bengaluru before moving to the US for a master’s and later an MBA.
India has spent decades treating an IIT degree as the golden ticket to the top of technology. Two Indian-origin engineers now running technical operations at OpenAI and Anthropic never got one.
Vijaye Raji, OpenAI’s CTO of Applications, studied engineering at Pondicherry Engineering College before spending a decade at Microsoft and later founding Statsig. Rahul Patil, Anthropic’s CTO, grew up in Bengaluru and studied engineering at PESIT before moving to the US for a master’s and later an MBA. Both eventually climbed to the top of two of the world’s most closely watched AI companies.
Their paths are strikingly similar. Neither came from India’s most celebrated engineering institutions. Both built careers through years at major technology companies before moving into leadership. And both now sit at the heart of the AI race.
There is a neat twist to the story.
The two men are proof that the IIT route is a path to Silicon Valley, not necessarily the path.
And in an industry that loves talking about colleges & degrees, that makes for an interesting footnote.
Read full story
DID YOU KNOW
Indian origin man becomes world’s youngest CA
NRI SPOTLIGHT
Indian-origin Karandeep Anand becomes Disney’s first CTO
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