Zscaler reported $3.77B in annual recurring revenue, up 25% YoY. CEO Jay Chaudhry's Zero Trust model is driving enterprise adoption as cloud security spending accelerates.
Zscaler reported $3.77 billion in annual recurring revenue, up 25% year-on-year, as its cloud-based security platform built on the Zero Trust model continues to gain traction with enterprises. The company, led by founder and CEO Jay Chaudhry, holds a market capitalisation of $26.6 billion, according to Yahoo Finance. Forbes estimates Chaudhry and his family own about 35% of Zscaler, putting his net worth at $9.3 billion.
Chaudhry, 68, grew up in the village of Panoh in Himachal Pradesh, where his family farmed without running water or electricity. He walked nearly 4 km to attend school in a neighbouring village, sometimes studying under a tree. At 22, he left India for the United States with a one-way ticket and $200. “The change I saw going from my village to the university was bigger for me than coming from India to the US,” he said in 2013.
After earning a bachelor's in electrical engineering from IIT (BHU) Varanasi and two master's degrees from the University of Cincinnati, Chaudhry worked at Unisys, NCR and IBM, which he called “one of the best sales training grounds”. In 1997, he and his wife Jyoti launched SecureIT, investing their $500,000 life savings after failing to secure venture capital in Atlanta. Within roughly 18 months, SecureIT's firewall had been deployed in nearly half of the Fortune 500. Chaudhry sold the company to VeriSign in 1998. Nearly two years later, more than 70 of SecureIT's 80 employees had become millionaires “on paper”, he told CNBC in 2024.
Chaudhry founded Zscaler in 2007, focusing on cloud-based cybersecurity with a Zero Trust architecture that follows the principle of “never trust, always verify” before granting access to users, devices and connections. The company's growth accelerated as businesses shifted toward cloud services, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Despite building a multibillion-dollar company, Chaudhry has repeatedly said wealth is not his primary measure of success. “I don’t believe that happiness has very much to do with money,” he said in an interview with The Australian in 2025. He continues to credit his parents for shaping his approach to work. “The biggest thing I learned from my parents, by watching them, was honesty, integrity and hard work. It is just part of life.”
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