When Parth Jindal ’12 began leading the JSW Group, his dad’s cement and paint conglomerate in India, he wanted to use sports to achieve brand awareness equal to that of Tata and Birlas, two of India’s most prominent conglomerates. A lifelong sportsman who played squash at Brown, he proposed a plan to make JSW synonymous with Indian excellence in Olympic sports. 

“I told my board, ‘If we could own that space, we could lift the entire brand,’” he said. It wasn’t an easy sell. “The board asked, ‘Isn’t that the government’s job?’ So I framed the idea as an investment both in India’s image and in JSW’s.”

Today, the portfolio of JSW Sports includes cricket team the Delhi Capitals and football (soccer) team Bengaluru FC. It also runs the Inspire Institute of Sport (IIS), India’s first private Olympic training facility. The investment has paid off. During the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, IIS athletes won three of India’s seven medals. The institute’s athletes won four medals at the 2024 Paris Olympics. JSW Sports hopes to have 40 IIS athletes qualify for the 2028 Olympics, to be held in Los Angeles. 

JSW was losing money when Jindal started nine years ago. In August 2025, he successfully took the company public. Jindal thinks his JSW-sports marriage will likewise ride a wave of success. “Globally, sport accounts for four to five percent of GDP, but in India, it’s barely 1 percent, and that’s mostly cricket. But as India’s middle class grows, sport will boom,” he said. “We could see eight times the growth in the next ten to fifteen years.”