- Indian-American billionaire Vinod Khosla ranks 10th on Forbes' Americas Greatest Innovators list
- He co-founded Sun Microsystems, a pioneer in network computing and open systems
- Khosla Ventures backs frontier tech including AI, biomedicine, and robotics startups
Indian-American Billionaire Vinod Khosla has been ranked 10th on the Forbes list of America's Greatest Innovators. It is a list of the top 250 US living innovators.
“Sun Microsystems, which Vinod Khosla cofounded, was an early pioneer in network computing. He then became a legendary venture capitalist with early bets on risky, complicated tech that produced giants such as Square, DoorDash and OpenAI,” Forbes said.
Sun Microsystems, which Vinod Khosla cofounded, was an early pioneer in network computing. He then became a legendary venture capitalist with early bets on risky, complicated tech that produced giants such as Square, DoorDash and OpenAI.
— Forbes (@Forbes) February 11, 2026
See where Khosla landed on the #Forbes250… pic.twitter.com/SasN9DCANe
Who Is Vinod Khosla?
Vinod Khosla was born in Pune on Jan. 28, 1955, into a Punjabi household. Khosla's father served as an officer in the Indian Army and had hoped his son would follow a similar path in uniform. Yet Khosla's aspirations lay elsewhere.
“Vinod grew up dreaming of being an entrepreneur, despite being from an Indian army household with no business or technology connections. Since the age of 16, when he first heard about the founding of Intel, he dreamt of starting his own technology company,” reads his profile on Khosla Ventures' website.
He is the founder of Khosla Ventures, a firm “focused on assisting entrepreneurs to build impactful technology-based disruptive companies.” As mentioned earlier, he is also a cofounder of Sun Microsystems.
According to Forbes, Khosla Ventures has built a reputation for backing frontier technologies, with investments spanning biomedicine and robotics. The firm was also an early investor in OpenAI, placing its bet before artificial intelligence entered the mainstream. In recent years, it has delivered notable returns, with portfolio companies Affirm and DoorDash going public in 2020 and 2021, while QuantumScape and Opendoor reached the markets through SPAC mergers.
Vinod Khosla graduated from IIT Delhi with a degree in electrical engineering before trying his hand at business. His initial venture, a soy milk enterprise designed for communities lacking refrigerators in India, failed to gain traction.
He subsequently relocated to the United States to pursue higher studies, obtaining a master's in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. With his entrepreneurial sights firmly set on Silicon Valley, he later completed an MBA at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.
“After my MBA at Stanford, I co-founded Daisy Systems, a CAE company which IPO'd in 1986. At Daisy, we spent 80% of our resources building custom computer hardware that could run our CAD software. So I left to create a startup that made the general purpose computers Daisy needed; Sun was born,” as per Khosla's LinkedIn profile.
Frustrated by the need to engineer bespoke hardware to run the Daisy software, he decided to tackle the problem head-on. In 1982, he co-founded Sun Microsystems, a company built around open standards and designed to supply powerful workstations to software developers.
As Sun's founding CEO, he championed open systems and helped commercialise RISC-based processors. The venture received early backing from his long-time associate John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Khosla stepped away from Sun Microsystems in 1986, shifting his focus entirely to venture capital. Nearly two decades later, in 2004, he established Khosla Ventures, a firm dedicated to backing science-driven and experimental technologies, as noted on his LinkedIn profile.
According to The Times of India, Khosla's wife, Neeru Khosla, is the co-founder and chair of the CK-12 Foundation, an organisation dedicated to advancing education. Together, they have four children: Nina Khosla, Vani Khosla, Neal Khosla and Anu Khosla.
As per Forbes, he has a net worth of $12.2 billion.
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