Wipro Limited

Information Technology Services and ConsultingFounded 1945- Updated July 2025

Last reviewed: July 2025

Content is for informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Data sourced from SEC filings, annual reports, and public records. See our full disclaimer and methodology.

CorpDigest

Search companiesSearchK Contact

Wipro Limited

Information Technology Services and ConsultingFounded 1945- Updated July 2025

Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya

Last reviewed: July 2025

Founders

Who Founded Wipro Limited?

Mohamed Hasham Premji · Founded 1945 · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Last reviewed: July 2025 · By Swet Parvadiya

Quick Answer

Wipro Limited was founded by Mohamed Hasham Premji in 1945 in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. The company is currently led by Azim Premji.

Founding Story

Mohamed Hasham Premji registered the company as Western India Palm Refined Oils in Amalner, Maharashtra in 1945, manufacturing cooking fats and toiletries. The business operated within the constraints of post-independence India's command economy, where operating licenses determined what you could make and in what quantities, and foreign exchange controls limited technology imports.

Azim Premji took control in 1966 when his father died unexpectedly, dropping out of Stanford University to return to India. He spent the first decade simply keeping the company alive and profitable — no grand technology pivot, just careful management of a manufacturing business in a difficult regulatory environment. The technology diversification came gradually: computing hardware distribution in the late 1970s, then hardware manufacturing under a government license in 1984, then software development as Indian engineers proved they could produce quality work at substantially lower cost than Western developers.

The Y2K boom of the late 1990s was the moment that put Wipro and the broader Indian IT services industry on Western corporate radar. American companies facing year-2000 date conversion problems hired Indian developers by the thousands. Wipro's revenues and headcount grew rapidly, and the relationships built during Y2K created the client pipelines that sustained growth into the 2000s.

The company's product engineering and research development services division — building embedded software for semiconductor chips, aerospace systems, and automotive electronics — represents a higher-value segment that Wipro has developed over years of specialization. These aren't commodity IT maintenance contracts; they require domain expertise that takes years to accumulate and creates genuine switching costs.

Mohamed Hasham Premji

Co-founder 1945

Background

Mohamed Hasham Premji was a prominent Indian businessman who founded Western India Palm Refined Oils Limited in 1945, establishing the foundation for what would eventually become Wipro Limited, one of the world's largest IT services conglomerates.

Role at Wipro Limited

Mohamed Hasham Premji founded Wipro in 1945 as a vegetable oil refining company in western India, recognizing the massive domestic demand for edible oils in the post-colonial era. Under his leadership, the company grew into a diversified consumer goods manufacturer, producing soaps, candles, and lighting products. Although it was his son, Azim Premji, who ultimately orchestrated the radical pivot into information technology, Hasham Premji's foundational emphasis on operational discipline, quality control, and navigating the complex bureaucratic landscape of the License Raj established the corporate DNA that would allow Wipro to survive and thrive in the highly competitive global technology sector. His legacy is one of building a resilient, diversified industrial base from the ground up in a challenging economic environment.

Wipro Limited: CEO & Leadership History

Full timeline â†’

Azim Premji

Chairman

1966-Present

Took over the struggling vegetable oil company at age 21 and orchestrated one of the most successful corporate pivots in history, transforming Wipro into a global IT services powerhouse while establishing a gold standard for corporate governance and philanthropy in India.

Vivek Paul

CEO

2000-2007

Driven the massive expansion of Wipro's global delivery model during the post-Y2K boom, aggressively executing a strategy of acquisitions and organic growth that established the company as a top-tier global IT services provider.

Thierry Delaporte

CEO

2020-2024

Tasked with accelerating the 'Wipro 3.0' digital transformation strategy, he focused on improving deal win rates and shifting the company toward high-margin digital engineering, though his tenure was marked by execution challenges and leadership transitions.

Srini Pallia

CEO

2024-Present

A 27-year Wipro veteran appointed to lead the company's AI-first transformation, focusing on accelerating execution speed, improving operational efficiency, and aggressively targeting high-margin digital engineering deals to escape the mid-tier growth trap.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Mohamed Hasham Premji, the original founder of Wipro?

Mohamed Hasham Premji founded Western India Palm Refined Oils Limited in 1945 in Amalner, a small town in the Jalgaon district of Maharashtra. He was a member of the Khoja Ismaili Muslim community, which had a long tradition of trading and small-scale manufacturing across western India. Mohamed Premji had operated a rice trading business before identifying an opportunity in processed vegetable oil and vanaspati, a hydrogenated cooking fat that was substituting for ghee in middle-class Indian kitchens during the 1940s. The original factory in Amalner produced groundnut oil, vegetable shortening and 787 laundry soap from byproducts, and Mohamed Premji ran the business as a hands-on owner-manager for two decades, growing revenue to roughly two crore rupees by the mid-1960s. He served as a member of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan briefly in 1947 but chose to remain in India after partition, declining Muhammad Ali Jinnah's reported personal invitation to join the new Pakistani state and instead bringing his family back to Maharashtra. Mohamed Premji died unexpectedly in 1966 at age fifty-one, prompting the family decision to recall Azim Premji from Stanford to take charge of the company. He is buried in Mumbai and is recognized today through the Mohammed Premji Centenary Award given to long-serving Wipro employees.

How did Azim Premji transform Wipro from cooking oil into a global IT giant?

Azim Hasham Premji left Stanford University in 1966 at age twenty-one to take charge of Wipro after his father's sudden death, abandoning a planned engineering degree he never returned to complete formally, although Stanford eventually awarded him the degree in 1999 based on his accomplishments. He inherited a company of roughly two crore rupees in revenue and 350 employees making vanaspati and laundry soap. Over the next five decades Azim Premji diversified the company through three successive waves: consumer products including Santoor soap launched in 1984 and Wipro Baby Soft toiletries; industrial products including hydraulic cylinders and lighting from 1975; and information technology beginning with minicomputers in 1981 and software services from 1990. He recruited Sridhar Mitra, Ashok Soota, Vivek Paul and Girish Paranjpe from companies like Tata Burroughs and Texas Instruments to build the IT business. The Y2K opportunity and the GE Medical Systems joint venture in 1990 with a forty-nine percent Wipro stake provided the springboard for global services, and the 2000 New York Stock Exchange American Depositary Receipt listing made Wipro the third-most-valuable Indian company at the dot-com peak. Premji retired from executive duties on July 30, 2019 and remained founder chairman until 2019, after which his son Rishad assumed the executive chairman role.

Why is Azim Premji called the conscience of Indian business and how much has he given to philanthropy?

Azim Premji has donated more than $21 billion to philanthropy through the Azim Premji Foundation, making him among the most generous individual philanthropists in the world by absolute dollar value and the most generous in Indian history. The Azim Premji Foundation was established in 2001 with an initial commitment focused on improving public education in India, particularly elementary school teaching quality in government schools across rural states such as Karnataka, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh. The foundation operates Azim Premji University, established in Bengaluru in 2010 and accredited to grant degrees in education, development and policy, with a second campus in Bhopal that opened in 2023. The funding mechanism is structured as irrevocable transfers of Wipro shares from Premji-family trusts to Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives, with cumulative transfers representing roughly 67 percent of all Wipro equity, although the family retains effective control through voting trusts. The philanthropy commitments tracked at $21 billion in 2019 grew further through subsequent share-price appreciation and additional transfers. Premji signed the Giving Pledge in 2013 alongside Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and his understated personal style, including driving an older Toyota and flying economy on domestic Indian flights, has earned him the description in Indian business media as the conscience of corporate India.

What role does Rishad Premji play as Executive Chairman and is he being groomed to lead?

Rishad Premji is the elder son of Azim Premji and has served as Executive Chairman of Wipro since July 31, 2019. Born in 1976, he holds a degree in economics from Wesleyan University and a master of business administration from Harvard Business School, and worked for four years at Bain and Company in London and GE Capital in the United States before joining Wipro in 2007 as a business manager in the banking, financial services and insurance vertical. He served as chief strategy officer from 2015 to 2019, where he led the acquisitions of Designit in 2015 and HealthPlan Services and Appirio in 2016 totaling roughly $1.5 billion, before being elevated to the executive chairman role on his father's retirement. As executive chairman, Rishad Premji chairs the board, sets strategy and capital allocation, and represents Wipro externally including before Indian regulators and international media, but day-to-day operational control sits with the chief executive role currently held by Srinivas Pallia. Rishad is also chairman of Nasscom for fiscal year 2019 to 2020 and serves on the boards of Wipro Enterprises and the Azim Premji Foundation. He is widely understood to represent permanent Premji family stewardship of Wipro rather than to be in line for the operating chief executive role himself.