About
Yusuf Hamied is a Cambridge-educated Chemist and the Non-Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors at Cipla, a large generic pharmaceuticals company founded in 1935 by his father, Khwaja Abdul Hamied. Yusuf became a global celebrity for his role in defying Western multinational pharmaceutical companies in order to provide generic AIDS treatments and other drugs to treat poor people in the developing world. After completing his doctorate in 1960, Yusuf joined the family company and vowed to break the dominance of foreign multinationals over the Indian pharmaceutical market by developing cheap generic drugs. Yusuf helped persuade the Indian government to change Indian patent law in 1972, permitting medicines to be copied even if they were under international patent, as long as the process was not the same. The law transformed the Indian pharmaceutical industry, enabling his and other companies to grow by manufacturing generic drugs. In 2001 Yusuf convulsed the global healthcare in
Position in the VCSift Database
- • 3 investors at Cipla are tracked.
- • 2 investors hold the Chairman of the Board role in VCSift. Yusuf Hamied is one of them.
- • 2,534 investors are based in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.
Data sourced from 410,343 investor profiles. Updated July 2026.
Investment Focus
- Location
- Mumbai, India
Contact Information
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