Sundar Pichai

Sundar grew up in a small two-room home in Madurai, where his family got its very first telephone when he was twelve — he still remembers the number. He was so good at remembering numbers that his friends used him as a phone book.

He studied engineering at IIT Kharagpur, then went to America on a scholarship. At Google he built the Chrome web browser and then Android, and in 2015 he became the CEO of Google — and later of its parent company Alphabet.

Pichai Sundararajan (born 1972 in Madurai) studied metallurgical engineering at IIT Kharagpur, then earned an MS from Stanford and an MBA from Wharton. He joined Google in 2004 and led product management for the Google Toolbar, then for Chrome — the browser he championed against internal skepticism and which grew into the world's most-used browser.

He later took over Android, Chrome OS and Google Apps.

He was appointed CEO of Google on 10 August 2015 when the company was restructured under Alphabet, and became CEO of Alphabet itself in December 2019, succeeding co-founder Larry Page. Under him, Google has pushed heavily into AI — TensorFlow, Google Assistant, Tensor Processing Units and, more recently, the Gemini family of models.

He received the Padma Bhushan in 2022.