Infosys started in Pune. One decision changed the course of India's startup story
Starting from a small garage in Pune, Narayana Murthy began Infosys. By 1995, the software company had scaled to Rs 30 crore of revenue, shifted its base to Bangalore and was listed on the Bangalore Stock Exchange
- Sep 7, 2026,
- Updated Sep 7, 2026 2:41 PM IST
Infosys began in Pune. By 1995, it had moved to Bengaluru - a seemingly simple decision that would have consequences far beyond the company itself.
In this excerpt from A Billion Bets: The Making of India's Startup Ecosystem, Aviral Bhatnagar traces the early years of Infosys alongside the rise of telecom and the internet in India, and explains how choices made by fledgling companies helped shape the country's startup ecosystem.
Here's The Excerpt
India's National Telecom policy was drafted in 1994. It is not remembered as a seminal moment for the country, but it would mark the beginning of a huge, multi-decade transformation. A Rajya Sabha member's son, Sunil Mittal, would bid for a telecom licence in Delhi, becoming one of India’s first technology entrepreneurs. The young Turk had initially been trading cycle parts, after which his company began selling push-button phones from Taiwan in India. The fledgling start-up clinched a deal with the French telecom firm Vivendi as the company needed telecom experience. The young start-up would be called the aspirational ‘Airtel’ as part of Bharti Enterprises.
The telecom sector was poised to become very hot soon. Unknown to Mittal or any early telecom entrepreneur, its consequences would be far-reaching. Telecom was firmly the hardware layer of this new transformation. On top of this earth-like hardware layer would be the highway of the internet.
In Case You Missed IT: From Aadhaar to UPI: Why Nandan Nilekani remains India's go-to architect for nation-scale reforms
The internet, ubiquitous today, was starting to gain wider global adoption. Initially started as a defence project in the early 1970s, it evolved into ARPANET, to connect founding universities as email and domain names gained popularity. By 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at Europe’s nuclear research organization, CERN, suggested a new framework for sharing information between computers. The goal was to create a universal linked information system. Three new technologies were introduced then. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) was used to create web pages. Uniform Resource Locator (URL) was used to locate web pages. HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) was used to transfer web pages. The three combined to form the World Wide Web or www. Thirty years later, all these technologies still survive, signalling how foundational they were. People started building websites on the www, accessed through terminals that had a hard time rendering anything beyond basic text.
In 1994, the same year as the telecom policy was passed, the internet debuted in India, with VSNL starting a dial-up connection. For those of you who have never heard that dial-up connection ringing, it cost a bomb. Rs 15,000 per year, which is about Rs 45,000 today for 9.6 kbps. Yes, kilobyte or 1/1000 of an MB. I remember very clearly the yellow icon that would render on a Windows 95 with a dial-up sound, to get instant access to some information from far away. It was indistinguishable from magic. The internet was transforming the hardware layer of telecom to make it more accessible to everyday people. Its ‘protocols’ would also power the third layer, information technology.
Must Read: Why did IT major Infosys choose Ashiss Kumar Dash to lead?
The third layer, which also had far-reaching consequences, emerged around the same time as telecom and the internet began to gain traction in India.
Starting from a small garage not too far away from where my family lived in Pune, Narayana Murthy began Infosys.
By 1995, the software company had scaled to Rs 30 crore of revenue, shifted its base to Bangalore and was listed on the Bangalore Stock Exchange. At the time, there were several regional exchanges across major Indian cities, not just the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and the National Stock Exchange (NSE).
Infosys’s decision to leave Pune and move to Bangalore would ultimately become a choice for the entire start-up ecosystem, not just one specific to Infosys. The company became a breeding ground for top talent in India, many of whom would eventually branch out independently. If they had remained in Pune, perhaps the story of Pune’s ecosystem would have been different. Seemingly small decisions, such as the choice of headquarters for a small company, have far-reaching consequences.
We don’t often think of companies like Infosys or Airtel as start-ups. But in their earliest years, that’s precisely what they were. Airtel was betting on a new and uncertain technology. Telecom had no precedent in India. No playbook, no paying users, no signal of what success looked like. Infosys was building a software services business that barely existed in the global imagination, let alone in India. Outsourcing was still a novel process and the market was beginning to take shape.
What made them start-ups wasn't their size or stage. It was the fact that they were building something uncertain, in a space where success was far from guaranteed. That, to me, is what defines a real start-up. A sweet shop may be new, but it sells something people already know how to buy. Infosys and Airtel were doing something different. They were inventing new businesses with no clarity on what the models would be.
In India, telecom hardware, internet protocols, and software came together simultaneously. As these foundations took shape in India, Indians abroad were not far behind. The seeds planted in the US by people who had migrated, like my parents’ batchmates, began to grow. Their skills had started to power the first generation of American tech companies.
(This is an excerpt from A Billion Bets: The Making of India's Startup Ecosystem by Aviral Bhatnagar. The book is published by Penguin Business)
Infosys began in Pune. By 1995, it had moved to Bengaluru - a seemingly simple decision that would have consequences far beyond the company itself.
In this excerpt from A Billion Bets: The Making of India's Startup Ecosystem, Aviral Bhatnagar traces the early years of Infosys alongside the rise of telecom and the internet in India, and explains how choices made by fledgling companies helped shape the country's startup ecosystem.
Here's The Excerpt
India's National Telecom policy was drafted in 1994. It is not remembered as a seminal moment for the country, but it would mark the beginning of a huge, multi-decade transformation. A Rajya Sabha member's son, Sunil Mittal, would bid for a telecom licence in Delhi, becoming one of India’s first technology entrepreneurs. The young Turk had initially been trading cycle parts, after which his company began selling push-button phones from Taiwan in India. The fledgling start-up clinched a deal with the French telecom firm Vivendi as the company needed telecom experience. The young start-up would be called the aspirational ‘Airtel’ as part of Bharti Enterprises.
The telecom sector was poised to become very hot soon. Unknown to Mittal or any early telecom entrepreneur, its consequences would be far-reaching. Telecom was firmly the hardware layer of this new transformation. On top of this earth-like hardware layer would be the highway of the internet.
In Case You Missed IT: From Aadhaar to UPI: Why Nandan Nilekani remains India's go-to architect for nation-scale reforms
The internet, ubiquitous today, was starting to gain wider global adoption. Initially started as a defence project in the early 1970s, it evolved into ARPANET, to connect founding universities as email and domain names gained popularity. By 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at Europe’s nuclear research organization, CERN, suggested a new framework for sharing information between computers. The goal was to create a universal linked information system. Three new technologies were introduced then. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) was used to create web pages. Uniform Resource Locator (URL) was used to locate web pages. HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) was used to transfer web pages. The three combined to form the World Wide Web or www. Thirty years later, all these technologies still survive, signalling how foundational they were. People started building websites on the www, accessed through terminals that had a hard time rendering anything beyond basic text.
In 1994, the same year as the telecom policy was passed, the internet debuted in India, with VSNL starting a dial-up connection. For those of you who have never heard that dial-up connection ringing, it cost a bomb. Rs 15,000 per year, which is about Rs 45,000 today for 9.6 kbps. Yes, kilobyte or 1/1000 of an MB. I remember very clearly the yellow icon that would render on a Windows 95 with a dial-up sound, to get instant access to some information from far away. It was indistinguishable from magic. The internet was transforming the hardware layer of telecom to make it more accessible to everyday people. Its ‘protocols’ would also power the third layer, information technology.
Must Read: Why did IT major Infosys choose Ashiss Kumar Dash to lead?
The third layer, which also had far-reaching consequences, emerged around the same time as telecom and the internet began to gain traction in India.
Starting from a small garage not too far away from where my family lived in Pune, Narayana Murthy began Infosys.
By 1995, the software company had scaled to Rs 30 crore of revenue, shifted its base to Bangalore and was listed on the Bangalore Stock Exchange. At the time, there were several regional exchanges across major Indian cities, not just the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and the National Stock Exchange (NSE).
Infosys’s decision to leave Pune and move to Bangalore would ultimately become a choice for the entire start-up ecosystem, not just one specific to Infosys. The company became a breeding ground for top talent in India, many of whom would eventually branch out independently. If they had remained in Pune, perhaps the story of Pune’s ecosystem would have been different. Seemingly small decisions, such as the choice of headquarters for a small company, have far-reaching consequences.
We don’t often think of companies like Infosys or Airtel as start-ups. But in their earliest years, that’s precisely what they were. Airtel was betting on a new and uncertain technology. Telecom had no precedent in India. No playbook, no paying users, no signal of what success looked like. Infosys was building a software services business that barely existed in the global imagination, let alone in India. Outsourcing was still a novel process and the market was beginning to take shape.
What made them start-ups wasn't their size or stage. It was the fact that they were building something uncertain, in a space where success was far from guaranteed. That, to me, is what defines a real start-up. A sweet shop may be new, but it sells something people already know how to buy. Infosys and Airtel were doing something different. They were inventing new businesses with no clarity on what the models would be.
In India, telecom hardware, internet protocols, and software came together simultaneously. As these foundations took shape in India, Indians abroad were not far behind. The seeds planted in the US by people who had migrated, like my parents’ batchmates, began to grow. Their skills had started to power the first generation of American tech companies.
(This is an excerpt from A Billion Bets: The Making of India's Startup Ecosystem by Aviral Bhatnagar. The book is published by Penguin Business)