Before he became the billionaire founder of cybersecurity company , grew up in Panoh, , in a farming family that lived without running water or electricity.
He walked nearly 4 km to attend school in a neighbouring village and sometimes studied under a tree. At 22, Chaudhry left India for the US with a one-way ticket and $200.
Today, the man born Jagtar Singh Chaudhry is known as Jay Chaudhry, founder and CEO of Zscaler. The cybersecurity company currently has a market capitalisation of $26.6 billion, according to Yahoo Finance’s compiled data, while Forbes puts Chaudhry’s net worth at $9.3 billion.
From Panoh to IIT-BHU
Chaudhry was the youngest son of farmers Bhagat and Surjeet Chaudhry. His village, which had fewer than 1,000 residents, had limited infrastructure, with families largely relying on themselves.
Education became his way forward. His high school in neighbouring Dhusara had only about three bookcases of books, but Chaudhry spent his summer vacations reading them.
“The change I saw going from my village to the university was bigger for me than coming from India to the US,” he said in 2013.
His academic performance earned him the No. 1 rank in Himachal Pradesh and admission to IIT (BHU) Varanasi, where he completed a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering.
At IIT, Chaudhry struggled with English while studying alongside convent-educated classmates. He eventually made a deal with a classmate: he would help with mathematics and science, while the classmate helped him improve his pronunciation.
JRD Tata’s three-minute interview
After IIT, Chaudhry secured an opportunity to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Cincinnati but faced a financial hurdle.
He applied for the Tata loan scholarship, which had around 25 recipients annually, and was interviewed by industrialist JRD Tata.
The meeting lasted only three minutes. Tata wished him “Good Luck” and told him to “Go and do well.”
The scholarship helped Chaudhry, 68, travel to the US and “paid for some of the early stuff” there, he later told the ‘One Million by One Million’ blog.
He went on to earn a master’s in electrical and computer engineering, followed by another master’s in industrial engineering management and an MBA from the University of Cincinnati.
From corporate jobs to his first startup
A customer demonstration at a Cincinnati startup changed Chaudhry’s career direction. When a sales engineer called in sick, Chaudhry was asked to conduct the presentation because he had written the software.
The experience was “more fun than writing code all day long,” he later recalled.
He subsequently worked at Unisys, NCR and IBM, which he described as “one of the best sales training grounds”.
Eventually, Chaudhry decided to leave his corporate career and start his own company. His wife Jyoti told him to “do it or…shut up,” according to the ‘One Million by One Million’ blog interview.
In 1997, the couple launched cybersecurity startup SecureIT, investing their $500,000 life savings after failing to secure venture capital in Atlanta. Jyoti left BellSouth to lead finance and operations.
Within around one-and-a-half years, SecureIT’s firewall had been deployed in nearly half of the Fortune 500. Chaudhry sold the company to VeriSign in 1998. Nearly two years later, more than 70 of SecureIT’s 80 employees had become millionaires “on paper”, he told CNBC in 2024.
Zscaler turns cybersecurity into a billion-dollar business
After ventures including CoreHarbor, CipherTrust and AirDefense, Chaudhry founded Zscaler in 2007.
The company focused on cloud-based cybersecurity and built its platform around Zero Trust, following the principle of “never trust, always verify” before granting access to users, devices and connections.
Zscaler’s growth accelerated as businesses shifted towards cloud services, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The company recently reported $3.77 billion in annual recurring revenue, up 25% year-on-year. Chaudhry and his family own around 35% of Zscaler, according to Forbes.
Despite building a multibillion-dollar company, Chaudhry has repeatedly said wealth is not his primary measure of success.
“I don’t believe that happiness has very much to do with money,” he said in an interview with The Australian in 2025.
He continues to credit his parents and his childhood for shaping his approach to work.
“My parents worked hard,” he said.
“So the biggest thing I learned from my parents, by watching them, was honesty, integrity and hard work. It is just part of life.”