Bharat Desai
Chairman, DS Foundation
Bharat co-founded Syntel with his wife, Neerja Sethi from their apartment in Troy, Michigan, in 1980 with $2,000, bringing in $30,000 in revenue in the first year. Thirty-eight years later, the tech consulting and outsourcing company has nearly 24,000 employees across the globe and generated nearly $1 billion in revenue in 2016. In October 2018, French IT firm Atos SE acquired Syntel for $3.4 billion in cash. Among other services, Syntel provides Software as a service (SaaS), delivering applications over the Internet.
Bharat was born in Kenya, lived in Mombasa and Ahmedabad, and came to the U.S. in 1976 as a programmer for Tata. He received his engineering degree from IIT-Bombay, and his MBA from Ross School of Business in Michigan. Bharat is director of ExpenseAdvisor and Cyberstate.org and a Member of the Young President’s Organization (YPO) of Detroit. He has received the award for IIT Alumnus of the Year and been recognized by Crain’s Detroit Business as a “Minority Business All-star.” He is a board member of several educational institutions, including the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) and the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He currently resides with his wife and two children in Fisher Island, Florida.
