Top Founders in IT: 11 People Who Built Ten Tech Companies and What They Do Now

This guide to the top founders in IT profiles 11 people behind ten companies: Hasso Plattner (SAP), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Masayoshi Son (SoftBank), N. R. Narayana Murthy (Infosys), Michael Dell (Dell Technologies), Ren Zhengfei (Huawei), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google) and Marc Benioff (Salesforce). For each one you get the founding year, the co-founders the company names, what the business went on to build and the role the founder holds today, all taken from pages the company or the founder’s current organization publishes.

The order is chronological by founding year. It is not a ranking, and no one on the list asked or paid for a spot.

How we chose these founders

Many founder lists lean heavily on one country and one decade. We set rules to spread the picture out and keep every line checkable:

1. The company’s core business is IT. Business software, operating systems, databases, chips, PCs and servers, telecom equipment, IT services and cloud applications all qualify. Retail, social media and car companies do not, even when they run large tech operations.
2. The founding role is on record. The company’s own history page, newsroom, leadership page or annual timeline has to name the person as a founder or co-founder.
3. The current role is on record. We only kept people whose present title we could confirm on an official page in October 2026. Two candidates we considered were dropped because no official page stated what they do now.
4. A spread of decades and regions. The ten companies were started between 1972 and 1999 in Germany, the United States, Japan, India and China.
5. One entry per company. Larry Page and Sergey Brin share one entry, since Google’s own story treats them as a pair.
6. Overlap with our CEO list kept small. Our companion guide to CEOs in IT covers sitting chief executives. Only one person, Jensen Huang, appears in both, and here the focus is on how Nvidia began.

We did not include net worth, pay, family life or anything not published by the company itself.

Founders at a glance

1. Hasso Plattner, SAP (1972)

Founding story: An SAP News feature dated May 13, 2024 says Plattner and Dietmar Hopp, after creating Germany’s first real-time software application with a user interface, founded Systemanalyse Programmentwicklung on April 1, 1972. Their IBM colleagues Claus Wellenreuther, Klaus Tschira and Hans-Werner Hector were co-founders. SAP’s history page describes the start the same way: five entrepreneurs in 1972.

What they built: In 1973 the group released RF, a financial accounting system in which the “R” stood for real time. Plattner led its development, and RF became the base for the modules later known as SAP R/1. The company took the SAP name in 1976 and went on to set the standard for ERP software.

Current role: At the Annual General Meeting on May 15, 2024, Plattner stepped down from SAP’s Supervisory Board after 21 years as its chairman. He founded the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, which the institute’s own site says dates from 1998 and is solely owned by the Hasso Plattner Foundation.

2. Bill Gates, Microsoft (1975)

Founding story: The Gates Foundation’s leadership page says Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975 with Paul Allen.

What they built: Microsoft’s timeline of company facts records that on Aug. 12, 1981 IBM introduced its personal computer with MS-DOS 1.0, Microsoft’s 16-bit operating system, and that Windows 95 reached customers on Aug. 24, 1995.

Current role: Gates moved to full-time work at the foundation in 2008 and is listed as its Chair and Board Member. He also runs Gates Ventures, his private office, and founded Breakthrough Energy, which backs clean technology companies.

3. Larry Ellison, Oracle (1977)

Founding story: Oracle’s executive biography states that Ellison founded the company in 1977. It does not name co-founders, so we do not list any here.

What they built: Oracle’s site today puts its cloud, database and Java products first, the lines the company is known for.

Current role: Ellison served as CEO until September 2014. He is now Executive Chairman of the Board and Chief Technology Officer, while the CEO title is shared by Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia, according to Oracle’s executive page.

4. Masayoshi Son, SoftBank (1981)

Founding story: SoftBank’s officer profile says Son founded Nihon SoftBank, now SoftBank Group Corp., in September 1981 and has served as chairman and CEO ever since. The profile lists no co-founders.

What they built: The same page credits him with taking the group into internet, telecommunications and AI businesses, investing in Alibaba Group, acquiring UK-based ARM Holdings and founding SoftBank Vision Fund.

Current role: As of the profile dated June 24, 2026, he is Representative Director, Corporate Officer, Chairman & CEO of SoftBank Group Corp., and he has been Chairman and Director of Arm Holdings plc since August 2023.

5. N. R. Narayana Murthy, Infosys (1981)

Founding story: The milestones on Infosys’s history page say the company was established in 1981 by Murthy and six engineers in Pune, India, with an initial capital of US$250, and that it signed its first client, Data Basics Corporation in New York, the same year. In 1983 it moved its headquarters to Bangalore.

What they built: Infosys credits Murthy with conceiving and putting in place the Global Delivery Model, in which software is developed by distributed teams for clients abroad. The model became the backbone of India’s software services industry.

Current role: His management profile lists him simply as Founder.

6. Michael Dell, Dell Technologies (1984)

Founding story: Dell’s leadership page says he founded the company in 1984 with $1,000. It names no co-founders.

What they built: The page credits his view of how technology should be designed, made and sold with changing the IT industry. In 2013 Michael Dell took the company private, then combined Dell, EMC and VMware in 2016 and returned Dell Technologies to the public markets in 2018.

Current role: He is chairman and chief executive officer of Dell Technologies.

7. Ren Zhengfei, Huawei (1987)

Founding story: Huawei’s executive profile says Ren studied at the Chongqing Institute of Civil Engineering and Architecture, worked in civil engineering and then served in the military’s Engineering Corps until 1983. After a job at a logistics base of the Shenzhen South Sea Oil Corporation, he set up Huawei in 1987 with CNY21,000 in capital. The profile names no co-founders.

What they built: Huawei today makes carrier network equipment, enterprise networking and storage, cloud services and consumer devices, according to the product menus on its site.

Current role: He became CEO in 1988 and has held the title since. His profile lists him as Director and CEO.

8. Jensen Huang, Nvidia (1993)

Founding story: Nvidia’s corporate timeline dates the company to April 5, 1993. Huang started it with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, and the three set out to bring 3D graphics to the gaming and multimedia markets.

What they built: Six years after the start, in 1999, the company says it invented the GPU, and its timeline links the 2012 AlexNet breakthrough in AI to Nvidia hardware.

Current role: He remains Nvidia’s founder and CEO, a title he has held since the first day, as his Nvidia newsroom bio confirms.

9. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google (1998)

Founding story: Google’s own account begins in 1995 at Stanford University, where Brin, a student there, showed Page around campus. A year later they were working together from their dorm rooms on a search engine called Backrub that judged pages by the links pointing to them. In August 1998, Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote them a check for $100,000, Google Inc. was incorporated and the team moved into a garage in Menlo Park, California.

What they built: The renamed engine carried the mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Search grew into the wider product line now held under Alphabet.

Current role: In December 2019 Page and Brin stepped back from their roles as CEO and President of Alphabet. Alphabet’s announcement said they would stay on as co-founders, shareholders and board members, and both are still listed on Alphabet’s board page.

10. Marc Benioff, Salesforce (1999)

Founding story: Salesforce’s history page says the company incorporated on March 8, 1999, when Benioff, Parker Harris, Frank Dominguez and Dave Moellenhoff began work on the first version of its CRM in a rented one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco.

What they built: The history page says salesforce.com officially went live in February 2000 at an event themed around “The End of Software,” selling CRM as an internet service. From the first day Benioff also set up the 1-1-1 model, committing 1% of the company’s equity, product and employee time to the community.

Current role: Benioff is Chair, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder. Parker Harris is listed on his own Salesforce bio page as Co-Founder and Advisor to the CEO.

Patterns across these founding stories

Reading the ten entries together shows a few things the individual profiles do not:

• Small starts were the rule. Infosys began with US$250, Dell with $1,000, Huawei with CNY21,000 and Google with one $100,000 check. Salesforce began in an apartment and Google in a garage.
• Teams were common. SAP had five founders, Salesforce four and Nvidia three. Infosys started with Murthy and six engineers. Solo founders such as Ellison, Son and Dell are the exception in this group.
• Founders tend to stay close. Eight of the eleven still hold a CEO, chair or board role at the company they started. Gates and Plattner moved to foundation and research work, and Murthy holds the founder title at Infosys.
• The first product was narrow. A real-time accounting program, a PC operating system, a graphics chip and a search engine all grew into far wider businesses.

For tech company founders still running their firms, the founding story and the CEO record overlap. That is why Jensen Huang appears in both this guide and our CEO list, with each piece covering a different part of his work.

Researching founders and company leaders

If you look into founders because you want to work with their companies, the people who own a given product or budget are usually several levels below them. Our article find decision makers sets out a way to chart those roles, the post find emails by company deals with research at the company level, and our notes on cold email outreach explain how to plan first contact. You can see what each Email Finder Online plan includes on the pricing page.

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