Seven men. 1981. Capital scraped mostly from their own savings. That was Infosys at the start, and it became the flagship of Indian IT services — the clearest case study anyone has of how the country attached itself to the global economy.

The mechanism was the Global Delivery Model: do the high-value software work in India, for clients anywhere. It sounds obvious in retrospect and was not obvious then. The 1993 listing, and later a listing on a US exchange, announced that Indian technology firms had arrived and intended to stay.

Compassionate capitalism, he called it: create wealth legally and ethically, then share its benefits widely.

Murthy's insistence on governance, transparency and merit was genuinely unusual in the business culture he operated in. Compassionate capitalism was his phrase for it — create wealth legally and ethically, then spread the benefit rather than hoard it.

He has since become the elder statesman of Indian entrepreneurship, mentoring founders and wading into national arguments about productivity, education and how much anyone should work. Infosys remains the benchmark that Indian technology ambition still gets measured against.

Murthy studied electrical engineering in Mysore and took a master's degree at IIT Kanpur, then worked in Paris on software for handling air cargo at Charles de Gaulle airport. He has described a hitchhiking journey home in the 1970s, during which he was detained on the border between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, as a turning point in his thinking about capitalism. Before Infosys he worked at Patni Computer Systems in Pune.

His wife, Sudha Murty, lent ten thousand rupees from her savings towards the founding capital, and later led the Infosys Foundation. Infosys listed in India in 1993 and in 1999 became the first Indian company to list on Nasdaq. It was also among the first Indian firms to give stock options to a broad base of employees, which made many early engineers wealthy and set a template for the industry.

Murthy was chief executive until 2002 and chairman until 2011, then returned as executive chairman in 2013 for about a year during a difficult period for the company. In 2023 his remark that young Indians should be ready to work seventy hours a week set off a national argument about productivity and work culture. He received the Padma Vibhushan in 2008, and Sudha Murty was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 2024.