Azim Premji

Azim Premji is an Indian businessman who took over his family's vegetable oil and soap manufacturing company, then called Western India Vegetable Products, at the age of twenty one after his father's death in 1966, and over the following decades diversified and renamed it Wipro, transforming it into one of India's largest information technology services companies. Under his leadership Wipro expanded from consumer goods into computer hardware in the 1980s and then into software services, becoming a major beneficiary of and contributor to India's IT services boom from the 1990s onward. He stepped down as executive chairman in 2019, handing leadership to his son Rishad Premji, and has separately become one of India's most prominent philanthropists, pledging the majority of his wealth to the Azim Premji Foundation, which works in Indian primary education.