7 IIT Madras Alumni Who Made It Big As Innovators

IIT Madras has the reputation of bringing out pioneers in the field of technology. The esteemed institute has been the temple of innovations. Its alumni have marked a niche in tech innovations from ISRO to DRDO and Google to self-established startups. Thus, in this article, we have a look at a few brilliant innovators from IIT Madras alumni list.

1. Bantval Jayant Baliga

Bantval Jayant Baliga is an Indian electrical engineer. He is best known for his work in power semiconductor devices, and particularly the invention of the insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT). IGBT is used widely, from electric cars to household appliances. It won Baliga a set of awards, including the prestigious Global Energy Prize.

His invention combines sciences from two streams Electronics engineering and Electrical engineering. This has resulted in cost savings of over $15 trillion for consumers and is forming a basis for a smart grid. Baliga has also worked in the academic field. He also founded three companies that made products based on semiconductor technologies.

Baliga once said, "After the initial replacement of vacuum tubes by solid-state devices in the 1950s, semiconductor power devices have taken a dominant role with silicon serving as the base material. These developments have been referred to as the Second Electronic Revolution." He may be a veteran now, but his words and works are way beyond today's generation's capabilities.

Bantval Jayant Baliga- Graduated IIT-M 1969

2. Gururaj Deshpande

Deshpande started his career at Codex Corporation, a Motorola subsidiary. Later, he co-founded Coral Networks, a router developer. He left the company prior to its sale in 1993. In 1990, Deshpande co-founded Cascade Communications, whose products were important in routing the early internet, initially serving as its President and later Executive Vice President; he hired Dan Smith as CEO. He sold Cascade to Ascend Communications for $3.7 billion in 1997.

Subsequently, with the help of MIT researchers, he launched Sycamore Networks in 1998. Sycamore Networks went public in October 1999 and raised a market cap of $18 billion. With his 21% shareholding in hand, this IPO made Deshpande one of the wealthiest self-made businessmen in the world. In 2000, he was featured on the Forbes 400 listing of Richest Americans. He is also Chairman of A123Systems, which manufactures high-power lithium-ion batteries, which went on NASDAQ in October 2009, and raised $438 million and trading at a 50% premium on the day of listing.

In July 2010, Deshpande was appointed by President Barack Obama to the Co-Chairmanship of the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. It is a group that supports the US President's innovation strategy.

But, he is not just an innovator. He is a philanthropist, who has donated 40 million dollars in charity in his lifetime. Deshpande is also the Chairman of Akshaya Patra USA.

IIT Madras states, "Creating jobs and wealth is only one aspect of Dr Deshpande’s achievements. He is a fine example for the motto of his Alma Mater – “Siddhir Bhawati Karmajaa”."

Gururaj Deshpande- Graduated IIT-M 1973

3. Krishna Bharat

Krishna Bharat is the innovator behind "Google News". At Google, Mountain View, he led a team developing Google News, a service that automatically indexes over 25,000 news websites in more than 35 languages to provide a summary of the News resources. He created Google News in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks to keep himself abreast of the developments. Since then, it has been a popular offering from Google's services. Google News was one of Google's first endeavours beyond offering just plain text searches on its page.

Before joining Google in 1999, he worked at the DEC Systems Research Center where, with George Mihaila, he developed the Hilltop algorithm. He worked on web search and information extraction at Google between 1999 and 2015. Then, he left Google in 2015 to become a founding adviser for Laserlike, a machine learning software startup. Bharat rejoined Google in July 2019 as a distinguished research scientist.

Krishna Bharat- Graduated IIT-M 1991

4. Senapathy "Kris" Gopalakrishnan

Senapathy Gopalakrishnan, popularly known as Kris Gopalakrishnan, is Chairman of Axilor Ventures, a company supporting and funding startups. He was the former executive vice-chairman (former co-chairman) of Infosys.

Indian IT sector has been benefitted by contributions of many stalwarts. But Infosys remains a hot favourite among the tech professionals. Many believe that Infosys changed the Indian IT sector. As a co-innovator, Gopalkrisnan should get the credit where it's due.

Gopalakrishnan has contributed Rs. 225 crores to develop a Centre for Brain Research at the IISc-Bangalore. Further, he is the donor of the largest philanthropic gift ever received by the 105-year-old institute from an individual. He has also contributed an additional Rs. 60 crores to set up distinguished visiting chairs in Neurocomputing and Data Science at the IISc-B and IIT Madras.

Currently, he heads a committee at MeitY to study issues related to non-personal data and suggest how the government should look at regulating it.

Senapathy "Kris" Gopalakrishnan- Graduated IIT-M- 1979

5. Anand Rajaraman

Anand Rajaraman is a famous web and technology entrepreneur. He co-founded Junglee Corp., an early pioneer of Internet comparison shopping. It was established in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1998. He later went on to start Cambrian Ventures and Kosmix.

Rajaraman went on to become Director of Technology at Amazon.com. Here he was responsible for technology strategy. He helped launch the transformation of Amazon from a retailer into a retail platform. He was the one to enable third-party retailers to sell on Amazon's website. Rajaraman also was an inventor of the concept underlying Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk.

Anand is also a special partner to NeoTribe Ventures. Here he publishes a blog called Datawocky, on which he discusses data mining techniques in search, social media, and advertising.

Anand Rajaraman- Graduated IIT-M 1989

6. Chandrasekaran Mohan

Dr C. Mohan has been an IBM researcher for 34 years in the database area, impacting numerous IBM and non-IBM products, the research and academic communities, and standards, especially with his invention of the ARIES family of database locking and recovery algorithms, and the Presumed Abort commit protocol. This IBM (1997), and ACM/IEEE (2002) Fellow has also served as the IBM India Chief Scientist for 3 years.

From IBM, Mohan has received 2 Corporate and 8 Outstanding Innovation/Technical Achievement Awards. He is also an inventor on 47 issued/pending patents and was named an IBM Master Inventor in 1997.

His seminal contributions in database recovery lead to the success of commercial database systems. He has also played a key role in establishing the foundations of database systems, which are at the core of modern information infrastructure, that support modern society. His work is among the lessons taught to students of database systems across the world. He has won numerous awards and holds key patents. It is rare for the work of one person to have had such significant research, commercial and societal impact, states IIT Madras as his bio.

Chandrasekaran Mohan- Graduated IIT-M 1977

7. Jaishankar Menon

Dr Menon has made several contributions to the industry in RAID, cluster file systems, storage virtualization etc. He was instrumental in establishing IBM Research as a world-class centre of competence in storage research. He started and was the technical visionary behind the SAN file System and SAN Volume Controller projects. Menon is also well-known as a pioneer in RAID Research and is one of the key early contributors to the technology behind what is now a $20B industry.

Dr Menon is the recipient of many awards and honours notable among them being IBM Fellow (2001), IBM Master Inventor, Fellow of IEEE, IEEE Wallace McDowell Award and IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Storage Systems Award. Further, he holds over 50 US Patents, is author of 31 refereed papers and contributing author of three books on database and storage systems.

Jaishankar Menon- Graduated IIT-M 1977