Vinay Maloo built the Enso Group on a quiet Jain idea of restraint. Two decades on, his son Vaibhav is carrying that inheritance forward, through scholarships, through software, and through a clear conviction about how a business should behave.
The Enso Group turned twenty in 2025, and the milestone said something about the family that runs it. This is not a house that grew loud. It grew steadily, away from the spotlight, in the foundational corners of the economy that keep everything else running. Mining. Energy. The vast, essential trade in natural resources that most people never pause to think about. To understand where the group is heading now, and why a resources dynasty is building privacy software, you have to begin with the man who started all of it, and with the faith that shaped him.
Vinay Maloo founded Enso in 2005. He is a commerce graduate out of Calcutta and an ardent Jain, a vegetarian by birth, a man who by most accounts treats meditation and restraint as part of the working day rather than a break from it. That is not incidental colour. Jain thought turns on a few principles that a hurried economy tends to forget. Take less than you could. Cause as little harm as possible. Treat wealth as something held in trust rather than owned outright. Vinay came up through telecom and natural resources in years when few Indian private players had the appetite for either, and he built the group into solar, mining, energy, real estate and healthcare across more than ten countries. The scale changed. The temperament, colleagues will tell you, stayed exactly as it began.
His son inherited both the business and the belief, then gave them a wider vocabulary. Vaibhav Maloo took over as Managing Director in 2009, young for the role, with an education that ran through Carnegie Mellon, then Oxford and Cambridge. He talks about sustainability and about competition that stays positive. He cites Bill Gates. He has written two books, The Business of Life and An Indian Manifesto, which is a rare line on an Indian promoter’s résumé. And he says, without the usual corporate hedging, that the real purpose of building wealth is to do some good with it. At its heart, that is the Jain idea his father lives by, carried intact into a new generation.
Legacy, in this family, is not the language of monuments. It is closer to stewardship. You will not find the Maloo name bolted onto buildings. What you find instead is the Enso Foundation, set up in 2013 and led by Vaibhav, working across education, healthcare, conservation and animal welfare under a phrase the family favours, an “Enlightened Life.”
The newest expression of all this is a software company. Enso Webworks, founded in 2023 as the group’s digital arm, is building what it calls the Info Universe, a set of roughly a dozen linked applications for communication, identity, productivity and data. It is held together by a single principle that sets it apart from most of the industry. There are no ads. The user, not the platform, owns the data. Products like InfoProfile and InfoPhone are built to cut through the friction of too many apps doing too many overlapping things. The company grew to 25,000 users in a quiet beta and has signed Boris Becker as a global ambassador, a clear signal that its ambitions reach well beyond India.
Read carefully, the software carries the same moral grammar as the founder’s faith. Refusing advertising money is a form of restraint. Handing users control of their own data is a version of taking less than you could. “Most startups optimise for installs,” Vaibhav has said. “We optimised for recognition first.” Brand first, product second, on the belief that trust compounds like interest. It is an unusual and confident line for a founder to hold, and it tells you the company means to be judged over years rather than quarters, which is exactly how a family raised on the long view has always thought.
The through-line is hard to miss. A father built a fortune away from the spotlight, guided by a faith that prizes restraint. A son is carrying it into the open, on students and on software, guided by the same instinct in newer clothes. Twenty years in, the Maloo legacy is not really the sectors it occupies or the borders it crosses. It is a single, steady conviction, carried from a Jain grandfather’s worldview into a startup’s terms of service. Make something worth being proud of. Then use it to do some good.
