BENGALURU: Nagarro co-founder Manas Human’s story spans an unexpected arc — from the tea town of Dibrugarh in Assam and classrooms in Delhi to the trading floor of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, where he helped build one of the world’s largest digital engineering companies.
Born in Dibrugarh, Human spent part of his childhood in Iraq before moving to Delhi as a teenager. He holds a PhD in Supply Chain Management from IIT Delhi and a Master’s degree in Manufacturing Systems Engineering from Stanford University, where he received a fellowship from the Stanford Institute for Manufacturing and Automation. In the 1990s, while in California, Human was fascinated by the world of software. “Everyone speaks the same language.
“Everyone spoke programming language,” he recalls. This belief eventually led him and a group of entrepreneurs to combine two small businesses in a modest office on the first floor and create a new company called Nagaro. The name itself came by chance. While searching for an available Internet domain, the founders came across the word “Nagarro” in a novel by Robert Ludlum. The book described it as “spirits emerging and spirits coming together.”
“We thought it was a real word. We later found out it wasn’t. We liked the idea, took the URL, and that’s been our flag for 30 years now,” Human said. The first years were slow and arduous. It took Nagarro five years to reach $1 million in annual revenue, 10 years to reach $5 million, 15 years to reach $20 million, and two decades to surpass $150 million. Then came the inflection point. In the next seven years, Nagarro’s revenues rose to nearly $1 billion, making it one of the fastest-growing digital engineering companies in the world. It historically operated within German IT services group Allgeier before being spun off and listed independently in December 2020. “We wanted to build the best engineering outcomes for our clients and work with the best companies in the world,” Human said. “Because we put all this effort into it, we were able to keep pace with this growth when the digital revolution took off. We designed around small, lean teams and highly skilled people, not hiring pyramids.
” This philosophy has remained intact as Nagarro has expanded, with the company continuing to operate through decentralized “two-pizza” teams and a non-hierarchical structure that maintains a startup culture. Today, as Persistent Systems seeks to acquire Nagarro in a $1.3 billion deal, Human says the timing reflects the next shift in technology. However, the human story extends beyond technology and business.
In 2022, when he was 50 years old, he changed his surname from Fuloria to Homan. In a deeply personal essay posted on German Unity Day on LinkedIn, he wrote that identities rooted in social class, religion, nationality and race were increasingly leading to conflict and polarization. He said the name change was a symbolic attempt to affirm a simple belief, “Whatever other identities I may have, I am a human being first.” As for the next chapter, the person has little doubt about his role. “The most important thing is not roles or titles. The most important thing is that the child you grow reaches great heights,” he said. “I’m here a lot.”