Una man among top 10 Indian billionaires in US

Lalit Mohan

Tribune News Service

Dharamsala, March 4

Jay Chaudhry, a native of Panoh village located about 12 km from Una on the Amb road, has been named among the top 10 Indian billionaires in the USA. Jay, born in 1959, is the CEO and founder of Zscaler, a cyber-security company.

In his village, people remember him by his original name Jagtar Singh Chaudhary. He did matriculation from Government School in his village. He used to walk 4 km to his school. Born to Bhagat Singh and Surjeet Kaur, Jay was the youngest among his three brothers. His teachers remember him as a brilliant student, who used to top in his class. He topped in prep class of Himachal Pradesh University.

Thereafter, he did bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi, and masters and MBA from the University of Cincinnati. Daljeet Chaudhary, elder brother of Jay, who retired as the principal of a government school in Una, is feels proud and happy at the success of his brother. He says that Jay was always hard working. He faced many problems in life but never gave up and his hard work had paid off, he adds.

Earlier, Jay had founded an air defence company (acquired by Motorola), Cipher Trust (acquired by Secure Computing), Core Harbor (acquired by AT&T) and Secure IT (acquired by Verisign). In 1997, Jay founded Secure IT and Cipher Trust. He is also a board member of Air2Web. After Zscaler’s IPO in March 2018, Jay was reckoned to be a billionaire. In 2018, he was selected as a finalist for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award programme in Northern California.

With a net worth of 6.9 billion US dollars, Jay was included in the 2020 Forbes 400 list of richest people in America, ranked 85th. He is among seven Indian-Americans to have made to the list. He is married to Jyoti.