It’s been 27 long years since Infosys came into existence and it’s been one roller coaster ride for the founders since the company was formed in the late 1980s. The move has since paid off, making the company the second largest Software Services company in India second to only TCS. The company has over 50,000 employees globally and a turnover in excess of $2 billion.

It was in 1981 that Chief Mentor Mr.Narayan Murthy borrowed $250 from his wife Sudha Murthy, who runs the Infosys foundation which is a charitable trust, to make his dream for the future. Infosys was registered as a private limited company on 2nd July in 1981 and the registered office was in NS Raghavan’s house who is also a co-founder and a director of the company which came to be known as Infosys Consultants Pvt Ltd.

The first office of the company was in Pune which was a rented house. It was in 1983 when Infosys shifted its base to Jayanagar in Bangalore when it got its first client, Data Basics Corporation from the United States.

The founders Murthy, Nilekani, Dinesh, Shibulal and Gopalkrishnan were into coding and wanted to make an impact in the American market and hence Infosys got its first joint venture partners in Kurt Salmon Associates. Gopalkrishnan, who had spent time working in the US was to be the public face of the venture, but when the venture went haywire and collapsed in 1989, the company was in the lurch. To make matters worse, Ashok Arora who was one of the directors of the company, quit in disappointment at the way things were going and went on selling his stake in the company just five years before the company went public. The other partners - Nilekani, Gopalakrishnan, Shibulal, Dinesh and Raghavan - decided to stay. And thus began to germinate the seeds of Infosys' enormous growth.

It was in Patni Computers where Narayana Murthy met Nandan Nilekani a IIT Graduate who later went on to become the CEO of Infosys who joined Narayana Murthy in walking out of patni along with a group of engineers to start their own software company which later sculpted into Infosys.
Today Infosys is the largest publicly traded IT services exporter in India, providing services to 315 large corporations, such as GE and Nortel, predominantly in the USA.

It was the first Indian company to list on the Nasdaq stock exchange in 1999.
This is a company which says it believes in the following: 1. 'We want to create wealth legally and ethically.'; 2. We believe a good night's sleep is worth a billion dollars.' ; and 3. 'A small percentage of a growing pie is better than a large part of a shrinking pie.' X