Infosys became the first company registered in India to list on an American stock exchange. In March 1999, Wall Street was scrambling to fix the Y2K bug and hungry for programmers. Infosys had thousands of engineers in Bangalore who wrote and maintained software for American banks, retailers and manufacturers. Clients sent the work over phone lines and satellite links. The Nasdaq listing told the world that a company from India could compete for the largest software contracts.

Started With Borrowed Rupees

N. R. Narayana Murthy and six colleagues founded Infosys in Pune in 1981, starting with a small sum Murthy borrowed from his wife, Sudha. They later moved the company to Bangalore. The bet was that Indian engineers, paid far less than their American peers, could do the same work from home with careful process. Infosys built a campus in Bangalore and sent engineers to client sites abroad. Its model came to be called global delivery.

Nasdaq, Then the Big Board

Infosys listed its American depositary shares on Nasdaq on March 11, 1999, at $34 a share, raising about $70 million. The Y2K rush and the dot-com boom drove years of fast growth. Infosys grew to hundreds of thousands of employees and served clients around the world. In 2012 it moved its listing from Nasdaq to the New York Stock Exchange. Infosys still trades there under INFY and in Mumbai.

Cover: Portrait of an Artist or Scholar, Mughal. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an Indian scholar at work (knowledge workers).