Founder Profile
Shiv Nadar
Last reviewed: September 2026 · By Swet Parvadiya
Background
Shiv Nadar possessed an incredibly rigorous, deeply technical background in advanced electrical and electronics engineering. Having successfully earned his degree from the prestigious PSG College of Technology and operating as an incredibly sharp systems engineer at Cooper Engineering, this intense foundation in applied microprocessing provided the exact technical mastery required to successfully build the massive HCL enterprise.
Founding Story
Shiv Nadar is a highly visionary Indian industrialist, legendary philanthropist, and the profoundly influential founding mastermind fundamentally responsible for building the massive HCL technology empire. Operating as a fiercely ambitious engineer at Delhi Cloth & General Mills (DCM) in the 1970s, Nadar aggressively recognized the massive impending global boom in microprocessing. In 1976, he relentlessly pooled resources with five incredibly skilled colleagues—including Subhash Arora and Arjun Malhotra—to completely abandon their secure corporate jobs and launch Hindustan Computers Limited (HCL). Serving as the absolute strategic anchor of the startup, Nadar fiercely drove the company's incredibly rapid transition from regional hardware manufacturing to a massively dominant global IT services and software powerhouse. His incredibly rigorous corporate leadership over four decades completely transformed HCL into an absolute multi-billion dollar monopoly, permanently cementing him as a founding titan of the modern Indian IT industry.