Indian colleges continue to receive generous donations from alumni who’ve made it big with their startups and companies.
Nakul Aggarwal & Ritesh Arora, the co-founders of Browserstack, have donated Rs. 100 crore to their alma mater IIT Bombay. Their gift will be used to rebuild Hostel 6 and modernize Hostels 7, 8 and 21 at the IIT Bombay campus. “Grateful for their inspiring commitment to their alma mater,” the IIT Bombay account posted on X.
Nakul Aggarwal and Ritesh Arora had together graduated from IIT Bombay in 2006 with degrees in Computer Science. They’d then built two startups — first Quarkbase.com in 2007, which was a platform to discover domain information about companies including founders, key people, website traffic, growth and funding, and then had worked on Downcase.com, which was a consulting operation. But in 2011, they’d founded Browserstack, which provided tools to help web developers test their code in different browsers and environments.
Browserstack grew profitably, and didn’t raise any external capital for the first six years of its existence. It then raised funding from prominent VCs, and became a unicorn in 2021. At that point, it became India’s highest-valued SaaS startup, edging past Freshworks with a valuation of $4 billion. Browserstack today powers over 2 million tests daily across 19 global data centers, serving 50,000+ customers, including enterprises like Sainsbury’s and OLX. Its founders, Nakul Aggarwal and Ritesh Arora, were India’s second richest self-made entrepreneurs in 2021 with net worths of Rs. 12,400 crore each.
Nakul Aggarwal and Ritesh Arora have now decided to give Rs. 100 crore to their alma mater. IIT Bombay is no stranger to large donations by its alumni — Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani has thus far donated Rs. 400 crore to the institution, and in 2023, an anonymous alumnus had donated Rs. 160 crore to the college. Last year, Motilal Oswal foundation had donated Rs. 130 crore to IIT Bombay, in spite of the founders not having attended the institute. Other institutions have also benefitted from the largesse of their alumni — Indigo’s Rakesh Gangwal has donated Rs. 100 crore to IIT Kanpur, Happiest Minds’ Ashok Soota has donated Rs. 20 crore to IIT Roorkee, and Reckitt’s Rakesh Kapoor has donated Rs. 10 crore to BITS Pilani.