IITian built Google's $100B ad business, saw startup fail, now leads a Rs 7,000-cr company
There is a familiar Indian story in Silicon Valley – an engineer leaves one of the country’s premier institutions, crosses the seas for higher studies and by and by finds his place among the people silhouetting the technology ecosystem. Sridhar Ramaswamy’s journey, however, took a less direct course.
A graduate of IIT Madras, Ramaswamy moved to the United States in 1989 and later earned a master’s degree and PhD in computer science from Brown University. His career took him through research positions at Bell Labs and other technology companies before he joined Google in 2003.
Recently, his journey was shared in a post on X, highlighting how his IIT education took him to Silicon Valley, then to Google, and later to entrepreneurship with Neeva.
His experience of seeing Neeva fail before eventually becoming the CEO of Snowflake has caught the attention of users.
At Google, he began as an engineer working on the back-end infrastructure of AdWords. Over the next 15 years, he rose through the company to become Senior Vice President of Ads and Commerce. During his tenure, Google’s advertising business grew from $1.5 billion to more than $100 billion, according to Snowflake.
But it was after Google that Ramaswamy attempted something of his own. He failed and became the CEO of Snowflake, a company now worths 7,000 crore.
In 2019, he co-founded Neeva, an ad-free search engine conceived as an alternative to the advertising-led model of conventional search. The idea was to build search around a subscription model rather than advertisements. Neeva launched in the US in 2021 and later expanded to the UK, France and Germany.
The experiment, however, did not reach the scale Ramaswamy had hoped for. Neeva eventually shut down its consumer search service, and in 2023, Snowflake acquired the company. Rather than marking the end of the road, the acquisition opened another chapter in Ramaswamy’s career.
He joined Snowflake in May 2023 and initially led its artificial-intelligence strategy. In February 2024, he was named the company’s chief executive officer, succeeding Frank Slootman.
Today, the IIT Madras alumnus sits at the head of a company that has become one of the prominent names in cloud data and enterprise AI. Snowflake reported $4.47 billion in revenue for fiscal 2026, while Ramaswamy continues to lead its push into AI and data infrastructure.
There is, perhaps, a quieter lesson in the progression from Google to Neeva and then Snowflake. Ramaswamy reached the upper ranks of one of the world’s largest technology companies, left to attempt a different model of search, saw that venture acquired, and then returned to the corporate world in a different role.
His own description on his professional profile is less about titles and valuations: “Technologist and humanist focused on harnessing the power of software for larger social good.”
The career, taken as a whole, is less a straight ascent than a succession of experiments - engineering, research, advertising, search and now artificial intelligence - with each stage leading to the next.- EndsPublished By: Rishab ChauhanPublished On: Sep 16, 2026 17:13 IST
