Jayshree Ullal: The Indian-origin billionaire who is worth more than Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella

Move over, Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella. Research company Hurun India has named its India Rich List 2025 and the individual at the top of the list is a far less public-facing executive.

In fact, Jayshree Ullal, the president and CEO of Arista Networks has acquired the top spot among Indian-origin leaders globally. With this ranking, Ullal has overtaken Sundar Pichai of Google and Satya Nadella of Microsoft in terms of personal wealth.

For those who don’t know, Arista Networks is a tech company that provides software-driven cloud networking solutions for data centres and cloud providers. Arista Networks disrupted traditional networking by bringing cloud principles to enterprise data centres, offering superior performance, reduced costs, and agility, especially crucial for data-intensive AI workloads today.

Here is all you need to know about the richest Indian-origin CEO, Jayshree Ullal.

Who is Jayshree Ullal?

The 63-year-old Indian-origin is a British-born billionaire who has been heading Arista Networks for the last 17 years. Ullal joined Arista in September 2008 and continues to serve as its CEO. Earlier this year, Ullal secured the second rank among the top five generation women wealth creators under the Candere Hurun Indian Women Leaders List 2025.

Ullal belongs to the GSB Smartha Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmin community and is widely regarded as one of the most respected Indian-origin business leaders on the global stage.

According to a report in Bloomberg, she moved to India at the age of five, where her father worked with India’s Ministry of Education and contributed to the creation of the Indian Institute of Technology.

According to her LinkedIn profile, Ullal completed her schooling at the Convent of Jesus & Mary in New Delhi before moving to the United States. After choosing to specialise in Electrical and Electronics Engineering during her undergraduate years at San Francisco State, she headed to Santa Clara University for her Master’s, studying Engineering Management, and graduated in 1986.

In 2025, the academic community opted to honour her decades of professional contributions by awarding her an Honorary Doctorate in Engineering.

Before joining Arista, she worked at Cisco Systems, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices), and Fairchild Semiconductor. It is at these early jobs that Ullal gained deep understanding of hardware, software, and large-scale systems. In fact, Ullal left Cisco in 2008 to join Arista Networks, then a tiny startup, and helped transform it into a leading cloud networking company, where she is now based in San Francisco. At the time of joining Arista, the firm had less than 30 people and operated from the basement of a law firm. Today, it is a major player in the cloud networking sector.

Over the years, Ullal’s leadership has been globally recognised. In 2015, she was honoured with Ernst & Young’s “Entrepreneur of the Year” award. Three years later, her name was included in Barron’s “World’s Best CEOs” list, and in 2019, Fortune named her among the “Top 20 Business Persons” worldwide.

What is Ullal’s net worth?

According to a report by Forbes, Ullal’s net worth is estimated at $5.7 billion. She owns nearly three per cent of Arista Networks’ shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange and currently ranks 713th globally by net worth.

Hurun notes that Ullal’s net worth has risen by $34 million since 2020 because of the boom in the AI and software services sector.

In comparison, Satya Nadella has a net worth of $1.1 billion, while Sundar Pichai’s net worth is an estimated $1.5 billion. Interestingly, while other Indian-origin leaders have seen dips in their net worth recently, Ullal’s finances have recorded a rise of $34 million since 2020, especially with the boom in AI and software services.

Some of the others on the list are Nikesh Arora from Palo Alto, Shantanu Narayen from Adobe, Satya Nadella from Microsoft, and Sundar Pichai from Alphabet.

With inputs from agencies