Cyrus Poonawalla, founder of the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine maker by volume, is ranked No. 95 on the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list, tied with Jay Y. Lee, with a net worth of $27 billion.
Cyrus Soli Poonawalla was born on May 11, 1941, in Pune, into a Parsi family. His father, Soli Poonawalla, was a horse breeder, and his mother was Gool Poonawalla.
Net Worth and Rank
- Forbes 2026 list: No. 95 (tied with Jay Y. Lee), with $27 billion
- Earlier estimates: Wikipedia says Forbes India ranked him fourth in India in 2022 with $24.3 billion and, in October 2024, ranked his family ninth with $22.1 billion
Building the Serum Institute
Poonawalla founded the Serum Institute of India in 1966. It became the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer by volume and supplies vaccines to more than 140 countries. It makes over 1.5 billion doses a year of vaccines including those for measles, polio and flu. He is chairman and managing director of the Cyrus Poonawalla Group, which also includes Poonawalla Fincorp, a non-banking finance company.
Honours
- Padma Shri in 2005, for medicine, and Padma Bhushan in 2022, for vaccine production during Covid-19
- Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year: in healthcare and life sciences in 2007, and for India in 2015
- Honorary doctorates: from the University of Massachusetts Medical School (2018) and the University of Oxford (2019)
- Other awards: the ICMR Lifetime Achievement Medal in 2019 and the Lokmanya Tilak National Award in 2021; he topped the Hurun Global Healthcare Rich List in 2022
Family and Philanthropy
Poonawalla was married to Villoo Poonawalla, who died in 2010. Their son Adar is CEO of the Serum Institute and also a partner in the consortium that bought the Rajasthan Royals cricket team in 2026, which is described in Lakshmi Mittal’s profile. In 2011 Poonawalla started the Villoo Poonawalla Foundation.
Why It Matters
The Serum Institute made vaccines available at low cost to much of the developing world, and the Poonawalla family’s ownership of it is the source of its fortune.
Net worth figures change daily with share prices. Rankings here follow the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list, with wealth measured on March 1, 2026.
Image: Adar Poonawalla (left) and Cyrus Poonawalla (second from left) at the 4th Asian Awards, April 12, 2014. Photo: TheAsianAwards / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)
