IIT Delhi graduate moved to US on H1-B visa in 2001, started own company after 7 years; now has a $2.3 billion net worth

Jyoti Bansal moved out of India with an engineering degree from IIT Delhi with a dream of becoming an entrepreneur in the US, but to achieve his goal, he had to work for a few years, as H1-B visa holders are not allowed to start a company.

From there, the journey to becoming a billionaire was never easy, according to a Forbes article that featured an interview with Bansal.

Bansal told Forbes that at 21, he hopped on a plane to California with nothing but a few hundred dollars and a big dream to become an entrepreneur. But getting a green card and starting a business required him to work first.

This prompted Jyoti Bansal to work for seven years as an engineer at three small enterprise tech companies, which sponsored his H1-B visa.

A green card and a dream come true

Jyoti Bansal finally got his hands on the much-anticipated green card seven years later — a path to follow his passion to start a business.

That's when Bansal came up with AppDynamics in 2008 — a troubleshooting platform for complicated websites like Netflix, which made it easier for their engineers to reduce downtime related to tech issues.

The entrepreneur scaled AppDynamics for more than a decade over six fundraising rounds after facing initial rejections and wanted to make it public when the company started making more than $200 million in revenue.

But instead, Bansal sold the platform for $3.7 billion to tech giant Cisco, according to Forbes estimates. This boosted his wealth to several hundred million dollars.

“I strongly believe to build a company, you have to spend a lot of time on it,” he told Forbes in the interview. “Ten years at least.”

Coming out of retirement, becoming a billionaire

Following the selling, Jyoti Bansal wanted to retire.

“I tried to retire,” he said.

"People say, ‘Once I retire, I'm going to do what I enjoy.’ I asked myself, ‘Do I enjoy playing golf all the time or being on the beach all the time?’ I don’t really. I realised why not just go back to what I enjoy, building a company.”

After travelling across countries for nearly half a year, Rajasthan-born Bansal grew tired and figured that he could follow his passion and start more companies.

This resulted in the birth of Harness, an AI-based software delivery platform, that raised $240 million in a funding round recently.

The funding, backed by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Institutional Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures, valued Harness at $5.5 billion, effectively making Bansal a billionaire.

According to Forbes estimates, Jyoti Bansal's net worth now is around $2.3 billion, thanks to an estimated 30% stake in Harness. Much of his wealth also comes from the cash he collected after the sale of his first company.