India’s Naveen Jain made it big in the United States with not one, but two companies. In hindsight, he had little more than a business exchange grant to deliver him from his poverty-stricken country.

In Washington (where he is presently based), he established InfoSpace and Intelius in just a space of six years. The former thrived in the 1990s until the early millennium as a directory service and web content provider. The younger one, Intelius, is currently registering considerable revenue growths in the Puget Sound region.

From its founding in 2003 hitherto, Intellius has exhibited an upward trend in its revenues, prompting Inc. Magazine to certify it an Inc. 500 company. The Inc. 500 refers to the cadre of privately traded American companies that have posted impressive profits in a certain span of years.

Deloitte & Touche was more unreserved in extolment; it put Intelius in the league of the 500 fastest-growing technological and media companies across North America.

If Intelius is profitable, InfoSpace was money-spinning. By trading publicly, InfoSpace gave Naveen Jain an all-time high in net worth — $2.2 billion. Investors like Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen invested in the company, which impressively drove 20 acquisitions, while MSN, Lycos, America Online, Snap, Disney, and the Wall Street Journal depended on its products. Naveen Jain steered the company as CEO from 1996 until 2002.

Intelius holds his attention nowadays; he is its CEO presently. Before, from 1989 until 1996, he was employed by the Microsoft Corporation, and before that, the Burroughs Corporation. Eventually he became the group manager for The Microsoft Network during the online service’s nascent stages.

In India, Naveen Jain attended schools in Roorkee and Jamshedpur. He finished a degree in engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology and a master’s degree at XLRI.

He, his wife, and three children are based today in Washington.