I grew up in a small town in India and received my primary education in Hindi. I got a rude shock when I entered engineering college, where the medium of education was purely English. Having personally faced a language barrier, it subconsciously formed a deep impact on my future career. I’ve had the fortune of actually watching the IT revolution, where I learned programming on compilers, and saw Apple and Microsoft unleash their personal computers upon the world. Seeing their beauty and marvel, I yearned to be able to make computers usable for Indians.

One of the earliest projects I worked on as a developer was to build a word processor for Indian languages. Many steps along this way, I founded my first startup, Summit Information Technologies, in 1991, that until today, stands as a pioneer in Indian and Asian language fonts and media solutions. Our solutions redefined the face of Indian language DTP in the ’90s. When the internet and smartphone revolution arrived in India, I saw another opportunity for the proliferation of Indian languages and co-founded Process9: a language-tech company building cutting-edge, AI-based localization solutions for digital businesses. We’ve built a world-class machine translation (MT) for Indian languages, and a website, an app, and document translation software to ease the process of multilingual transformation for businesses.

Outside of this, I mentor startups and contribute to the growth of the Indian software industry through leadership positions at the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE), and many other industry forums. I’m passionately involved in making my city, Gurgaon, a better place to live and work through city infrastructure improvement. I co-founded Atmanirbhar — an NGO fostering community development in and around Pilani, Rajasthan — by providing an ecosystem for skill training, job creation, health, education, entrepreneurship, women’s rights, more.

My 35+ year career has been devoted to bringing language equality in the digital realm, and this recognition has reenergized me to keep going.