Vipul Ved Prakash is often described as a ‘determined autodidact’. It is not hard to find out why. Take his LinkedIn profile as a case in point. It lists a fairly long list of jobs that Vipul has worked on over the years and a smaller list of important projects that he has undertaken. What is missing is the column about his education qualifications. That is because Vipul hasn’t any. It is while studying for an undergraduate degree in mathematics, physics and computer science that Vipul has decided to drop out of St.Stephen’s College, Delhi, to pursue his passion. Writing software. Along with Ashish Gulhati, he has co-founded one of India’s first privately-owned internet service providers Sense/Net. It is while working there that he has formulated the famous Vipul’s Razor, a collaborative anti-spam system.
In 2001, he has joined the then internet giant Napster as an engineer. After a short stint there, he founded CloudMark which used the Vipul’s Razor technology to build email security software for consumers and enterprise customers. In 2007 he co-founded and acted as the CTO of Topsy Labs, a social search and analytics firm that has been acquired by Apple in December last year for $200 million. A famous and ardent supporter of the free software movement, Vipul has been named by the MIT Technology Review as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
