Piyush Somani — Long-form Bio (500 words)

Piyush Somani is the Founder, Chairman & Managing Director of ESDS Software Solution Limited — India's most trusted sovereign cloud and data centre company — and President of the Bharat Digital Infrastructure Association (BDIA). He is one of India's quiet architects of digital sovereignty, and a public advocate for the principle of Data Swaraj — that India must determine how Indian data is collected, stored, governed, and monetised.

Born on 28 November 1979 in Malkapur, Buldhana district, Maharashtra, Piyush is a first-generation entrepreneur. The son of a Bank of Baroda officer, he completed his B.E. in Electronics from AmrutVahini College of Engineering, Sangamner, in 2002. After a brief first job at Shanti Instruments and a stint at Aress Software in Nashik, he founded ESDS on 4 January 2005 — operating initially out of a borrowed kindergarten classroom on a Rs. 25,000 cheque from his father.

Twenty-one years later, ESDS serves over 40,000 customers, 450+ banking institutions, and 80% of India's Smart Cities, across 19 countries with more than 600 employees. The company operates six data centres — Nashik, Airoli (Navi Mumbai), Bengaluru, Mohali, Noida, and Kolkata — with the ₹1,000 crore Sahibabad Green Data Centre with Central Electronics Limited (CSIR PSU) currently in build-out, inaugurated by UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and Union Minister Dr. Jitendra Singh in June 2025.

Piyush holds three patents on vertical auto-scaling cloud technology — granted in the United States (US 9176788 B2, 2015), the United Kingdom (GB 2493812 B, 2017), and India. He is the architect of EnlightAIX, a sovereign AI hyperscaler with an eight-layer, 189-module architecture purpose-built for India's compute future, and leads the SAI / SharonAI sovereign GPU programme.

As President of BDIA, he has authored or contributed to several major policy submissions to the Government of India, including papers on digital sovereignty submitted to MeitY, GPU infrastructure roadmaps, CERT-In strategic advisories, and Union Budget responses on data centre incentives.

Piyush is the author of two books — "Entrepreneur with The Fire Within" (2020), a memoir of the journey from a kindergarten classroom in Nashik to India's most trusted sovereign cloud, and "Living in Harmony with the Sun", on circadian alignment, the Satvic life, and Ayurvedic wellness. He has been recognised with the JCI Top Outstanding Young Person of India award (2015), the Nashik Ratna (2018), the Sakal Excellence Award (2019), and ESDS has been ranked among the 15 Best Workplaces in Asia by Great Place to Work.

A daily Vipassana practitioner since his transformative retreat at Dhammagiri Igatpuri at the start of 2020, Piyush rises at 4 AM for meditation, pranayama, and yoga before any work begins. He follows a strict Satvic vegetarian lifestyle. He lives in Nashik with his wife Komal Somani — Chief People Officer at ESDS — and their two sons, Piyansh and Prajit. His mother Sarala Somani remains a shareholder in the company. The book is dedicated to his late father, Shri Prakashchandra Onkardasji Somani, who served the Bank of Baroda for thirty-three years and passed away in 2009.