Nagavara Ramarao Narayana Murthy

Nagavara Ramarao Narayana Murthy, known publicly as N.R. Narayana Murthy, is the founder and chairman emeritus of Infosys, an Indian multinational company that provides IT services, consulting, and business-process outsourcing, including custom software development, systems integration, and IT consulting. Headquartered in Bengaluru, Infosys is one of India's largest IT exporters and was the first Indian company listed on the NASDAQ exchange. Murthy led it as chief executive for its first two decades and became a widely cited figure in Indian business for his views on ethics and governance.

Background

Murthy was born on 20 August 1946 in Sidlaghatta, in the Kolar district of Karnataka, into a middle-class Kannada-speaking Deshastha Madhva Brahmin family. He was one of eight children. His father was a schoolteacher of modest means who taught mathematics, and Murthy has said his parents instilled values of hard work, independence, and public service. He grew up with the socialist, left-leaning worldview common in India at the time.

He earned a bachelor of engineering in electrical engineering from the National Institute of Engineering at the University of Mysore in 1967, and a master of technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1969. Murthy describes a formative incident in 1974, when he was detained for several days near the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border while traveling by train through Eastern Europe on his way home from a work stint in Paris. He has said the experience ended his sympathy for left-wing politics and moved him toward what he later called compassionate capitalism.¹

Getting started

Murthy's first job was as chief systems programmer at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, where he says he first grasped the importance of management alongside technology. In the early 1970s he worked in Paris, where he helped design an operating system for air-cargo handling at Charles de Gaulle Airport, before returning to India in the belief that he could add more value there.² His first venture, a domestic-market software company called Softronics, was founded in 1977 and failed within roughly nine to eighteen months. He then joined Patni Computer Systems in Pune, and married Sudha Kulkarni, now known as Sudha Murty, in February 1978.

Murthy has described the founding insight behind Infosys: India held an underused pool of skilled, low-cost, English-speaking engineers just as affordable 32-bit superminicomputers and relational-database transaction software made offshore custom software delivery to Western firms viable, with no domestic venture-capital industry to fund it.² In 1981 he founded Infosys in Pune with six other engineers, including Nandan Nilekani, S. Gopalakrishnan, and S.D. Shibulal. The company was seeded with about 10,000 rupees, roughly 250 dollars, that his wife had set aside from her Tata job without telling him, money she had reserved because his prior venture had failed.¹

What he built

Infosys was registered as a private company on 2 July 1981, with its first office in a co-founder's Mumbai home, and moved its headquarters to Bangalore in 1983. In 1993 the company held an initial public offering on the Bombay Stock Exchange and introduced broad-based employee stock ownership, unusual for Indian industry at the time. In 1999 it became the first India-registered company listed on NASDAQ, with revenue then around 121 million dollars, and in 2004 it became the first Indian IT company to cross one billion dollars in annual revenue.

Murthy served as chief executive from 1981 to 2002, when Nandan Nilekani succeeded him, then as chairman from 2002 to 2006, and later as chief mentor. He retired fully in 2011 as chairman emeritus, returned briefly as executive chairman from June 2013 to 2014 during a turnaround period, and then left executive roles for good. He is credited with developing the Global Delivery Model for IT outsourcing, which became a template across the Indian IT-services industry.² By the mid-2020s Infosys employed roughly 300,000 people worldwide, with a market capitalization of about 50 billion dollars as of July 2026. As of January 2025, Forbes estimated Murthy's net worth at approximately 5.0 billion dollars.

How he operates

Murthy is associated with a set of principles he calls compassionate capitalism: create wealth ethically, then share it broadly with employees, be last to benefit, avoid using company resources for personal enrichment, and prioritize the security of the most junior employee over personal luxury.¹ A line he often repeats is that growth is the result of what you do, but respect is the result of how you do it. He has championed corporate governance, describing independent boards as a company's conscience rather than the chief executive's fan club. He is also known for a frugal lifestyle, including a widely reported habit of cleaning his own bathroom, despite Infosys's scale.

Where things stand

Murthy is fully retired from Infosys management and active as a public commentator on India's economy, entrepreneurship, and governance, including skepticism about AI hype, saying that most of what he sees labeled AI is old programming. He runs Catamaran Ventures, his family's investment office, with his son Rohan Murty, founder of Soroco. His wife Sudha Murty is a prominent author and philanthropist and, since 2024, a nominated Rajya Sabha member of parliament. His daughter Akshata Murty is married to Rishi Sunak, who served as UK prime minister from 2022 to 2024. Between 2023 and 2025 Murthy became a focus of public controversy for advocating a 70-hour, and later a 72-hour, work week for young Indians, drawing significant backlash even as he called for fairer profit-sharing and dignity for workers.³

Key facts

• Founded Infosys in 1981 with six other engineers and about 250 dollars borrowed from his wife's savings, after his first venture, Softronics, had failed.
• Has said a brief 1974 detention near the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border shifted him from left-wing politics toward what he calls compassionate capitalism.
• Led Infosys to become the first India-registered company on NASDAQ in 1999 and the first Indian IT company to reach one billion dollars in revenue in 2004.
• Barred family members from working at Infosys as an anti-nepotism principle, a decision he later said he regretted regarding his wife Sudha.
• His daughter Akshata is married to Rishi Sunak, former UK prime minister.
• Sparked major public debate between 2023 and 2025 by advocating 70-hour and then 72-hour work weeks.