Gupta co-founded
Integrated Systems Inc., an
embedded software company, in 1980 and was the company's CEO for 15 years. In 1990, he took the company went public, and later merged with
Wind River Systems. He remained on that board until it was acquired by
Intel. Gupta, via Nexus, had made investments in several developers' products including
HyperTrack, H2O, and Postman. He also had investments in
cloud computing and other
e-commerce companies including
Aryaka,
DimDim, Druva, mCheck, PubMatic and
Snapdeal. These companies were primarily developed by Indian
entrepreneurs to serve international markets.
India advocacy Operating out of
Silicon Valley, Gupta was an advocate for driving investments in the Indian technology and startup ecosystem. In a 2012 interview with
The Wall Street Journal, Gupta had predicted that, within a few years, India would be building "billion-dollar startups". He said that the traditional approach to investment used in Silicon Valley is not really accepted in India. He sees a great deal of "untapped potential" in software industries like
cloud computing and
mobile apps. Yet there are "special challenges" for those investing in India. Gupta expanded: "Certainly fast-growing startups need more hand-holding than they need in the U.S. While we have quite a bit of technology talent in India, we don't have leadership and marketing talent." Plus, there is often a push from Indian entrepreneurs to sell earlier than they should, rather than waiting to develop a "billion dollar enterprise over many years". Through Nexus, Gupta has developed a greater sense of how to work within Indian culture. He said that, "most investors in the U.S. won't understand how family-run businesses in India run." Basically, Indian entrepreneurs have to get with the program in order to understand "what tickles the fancy of consumers", since there has not been one independent firm that has emerged as a key player here, which Gupta says "makes no sense. Korea has done that, Japan has, China has, but not India." Gupta had helped organize the Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi's visit to the United States and to Silicon Valley in the summer of 2015. Gupta was quoted as saying "Innovation is a state of mind, and he is saying, help him bring that state of mind to India. Big changes are pretty much impossible to make. What you need to do in a democracy is take a thousand little steps."
Board memberships Gupta was chairman of the board at
Red Hat, and a member of the
Board of Trustees of the
California Institute of Technology and the Asia Society of Northern California. He also sat on the boards of a variety of privately held companies. In 2021, Gupta, along with his wife, instituted a
fellowship at Caltech toward research on smart devices and artificial intelligence as a part of the institute's
Sensing to Intelligence initiative. == Personal life ==