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IITians

Narendra Karmarkar (IIT Bombay, B.Tech EE, 1978)

Narendra Karmarkar, a brilliant alumnus of IIT Bombay (B.Tech, 1978), is a towering figure in the world of theoretical mathematics and computer science. While working at Bell Labs in 1984, he published a landmark discovery known as Karmarkar’s Algorithm. At the time, Linear Programming (LP)—the mathematical method used by industries to find the most efficient way to distribute resources—was largely solved using the Simplex method, which could be dreadfully slow for complex problems.

Karmarkar’s breakthrough was the first truly "efficient" polynomial-time algorithm for linear programming. By utilizing an "interior point" method—essentially cutting through the center of a multidimensional shape rather than crawling along its edges—he proved that massive optimization problems could be solved in P-time (polynomial time). His work didn’t just win him the prestigious Fulkerson Prize; it fundamentally changed how global logistics, telecommunications, and finance operate today.

Arun Netravali (IIT Bombay, B.Tech EE, 1967)

Arun Netravali made video tractable — and in doing so, quietly built the plumbing for half of modern digital life. After his B.Tech at IIT Bombay, he earned his MS and PhD at Rice University and joined Bell Labs in 1972, eventually becoming its ninth President. His pioneering work on video compression standards served as the key base technology for MPEG and enabled digital TV, HDTV, and streaming video — ushering in what was called a digital video revolution. The lineage is striking: the compression math he helped establish is the reason a high-definition film fits down a phone connection at all. The resulting technology is used in most TV sets and essentially all mobile phones today.

Netravali also worked at NASA from 1970 to 1972, solving technical problems for the space shuttle project.

Vinod Khosla (IIT Delhi, B.Tech EE, 1976)

In 1982, at age 27, Vinod Khosla co-founded Sun Microsystems with Andy Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy, and Bill Joy, serving as its founding CEO and pioneering open systems, commercial RISC processors, and Java — a company that went from zero to a billion dollars in annual sales in five years. Sun's machines and standards were foundational to the early internet's server backbone.

His second act may be even larger. In 2004 he founded Khosla Ventures to make aggressive, unconventional bets, and the firm now manages roughly $16 billion across AI, climate technology, healthcare, and frontier science. Relevant to your own field: he was one of the earliest backers of OpenAI, investing $50 million in 2019 for a 5% stake, years before ChatGPT — and in October 2024 his firm raised a $405 million special purpose vehicle specifically to invest further in OpenAI. He famously rejects the "venture capitalist" label, preferring "venture assistant."

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