Few stories capture the immigrant contribution to the United States’ innovation economy quite like that of Ram Shriram. Best known in Silicon Valley as one of Google’s earliest investors and a founding board member of the company, Shriram has spent the past two decades building a quieter, less publicised legacy focused on opening doors to education for students who would otherwise not have access to them through his Dhanam Foundation.
Despite its grantmaking growing more than fourfold from approximately $6 million annually in its earlier years, the foundation keeps a low public profile, with neither a public website nor publicly available contact information for grant inquiries. The venture capitalist and philanthropist’s work is a reminder that the immigrant contribution to American life includes the sustained, unglamorous work of building access to opportunity for the next generation of students, in India and in the United States alike.
A foundation built on access
Ram Shriram serves as president of the Dhanam Foundation, the private family foundation he established with his wife, Vijay Shriram, in 2004. With assets exceeding $240 million, Dhanam directs its multi-million dollar grants quietly towards higher education, research, and career development.
What distinguishes the Shrirams’ giving is its consistent focus on access and representation. The foundation’s grantee portfolio spans scholarship and mentorship programmes for low-income, African American, Latino, women, and first-generation college students, channelled through organisations including Ashoka University, Magic Bus, SMASH Academy, the Anita Borg Institute, Stockton Scholars, IIT Madras, USC, Stanford University, the Asian Art Museum, and the Exploratorium.
Reach on both continents
In India, Dhanam funds merit-based scholarships at IIT Madras, including support for the B.Tech programme and the institute’s online data science courses, with need-based awards reaching up to INR 5 lakh a year for students from low-income families. The foundation’s education focus extends to Ashoka University and Magic Bus, both working to widen access for young people who would otherwise be shut out of higher education and stable careers.
In the US, the Shrirams’ most visible gift established the Shriram Center for Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. Ram Shriram has served as a Stanford trustee since 2009, and the family has also endowed the Shriram Family Professorship and Fellowship in Science Education at the university’s Graduate School of Education. Vijay Shriram, meanwhile, has taken on her own civic role, serving on the board of trustees of San Francisco’s Exploratorium.
A model of understated giving
Where much of American philanthropy is built around naming rights and public campaigns, the Shrirams have taken a more understated path. Dhanam Foundation does not accept unsolicited proposals and self-selects its grantees, a structure that has kept its work largely out of the headlines even as its footprint has grown.
From Chennai to Silicon Valley
Born in Bangalore and raised in Chennai, Shriram studied mathematics at Loyola College, University of Madras, before beginning his career at Bell-Northern Research in Canada. In a Forbes interview he shared that his father had passed away when he was three, and was raised by his grandparents as his mother was only 25 then. She continued her higher education and went on to become a professor of English at the University of Madras.
To this day, I look back on those humble beginnings as actually a privilege because if I didn’t have that, I probably would not have been as driven and intensely focussed in doing the right things.
Ram Shriram
He moved into the heart of the dot-com boom in 1994, joining Netscape as a vice president at a time when the internet was still finding its commercial footing. He went on to become president of Junglee, an early online comparison-shopping platform, before it was acquired by Amazon in 1998.
He stayed on as Amazon’s vice president of business development until 2000, when he left to found Sherpalo Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm in Menlo Park. It was around this time that Shriram became a founding board member and one of the first investors in a fledgling search company called Google, a bet that would come to define his public profile and his fortune.
Shriram’s Dhanam Foundation remains one of the quieter forces in Indian-American philanthropy, its influence measured less in headlines than in the students it has helped put through school.
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