Hardeep Singh
Zoho Corp, an Indian software-as-a-service (SaaS) firm, recently invested Rs 35 crore ($5 million) in MRI startup Voxelgrids.
The investment, according to Sridhar Vembu, Co-founder and CEO of Zoho Corp, is part of the SaaS company’s goal to develop deep technology and R&D in order to maintain and gain significant technological know-how.
In MRI equipment, superconducting magnets and other cutting-edge technology are used. While this technology is fascinating in its own right, it has far-reaching implications in a variety of fields. According to Zoho’s founder, the Chennai-based company intends to invest in these technologies and spread those investments across landscapes.
Zoho now provides more than 40 apps for online accounting, human resource management, and inventory management, as well as cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. Some of these products, such as Zoho Desk, a customer service software, were developed in Vembu’s Mathalamparai office, demonstrating Vembu’s philosophy that world-class goods do not have to be created in urban areas.
Sridhar Vembu was hired as a lecturer after completing his doctoral studies at Princeton. He decided to work for Qualcomm as a wireless systems engineer after realising that his focus was not research but actual execution. With a big pool of software developers but few software products in the 1990s, India’s software ecosystem was still in its infancy. Vembu made the decision to enter the market as a result.
He left Qualcomm a few years later and, with two of his siblings and three friends, started AdventNet Inc. in 1996.
In the year 2000, he was named CEO of the corporation.
According to Vembu, Zoho’s overall goal is to become a deep technology supplier and one of the top five technology players in the world. The company aspires to have extensive technological expertise in a variety of fields such as software, semiconductors, and medical devices.
There is a demand for industrial and technological know-how, and Zoho is able to invest in it because of its significant experience in this field, he continues.
India, he claims, requires technological know-how and the creation of essential technology that the country relies on. While the government has established clear objectives, Sridhar believes it is now time for the private sector to step up and engage in research and development to help build these capabilities. This has now become a national priority, with Zoho Corp spearheading the charge.
Sridhar Vembu is the founder and CEO of Zoho, a privately held cloud-based business software company.
Vembu and his siblings co-founded AdventNet with two siblings and three friends, and they now own a substantial stake in Zoho.
Zoho has over 60 million global users, and its core product, Zoho One, includes over 45 apps.
Vembu earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton and joined Qualcomm in 1994.
Zoho has built a new 375-acre facility on the site of a former farm in Austin, Texas.
Vembu’s well-publicized relocation to the hamlet of Mathalamparai in Tamil Nadu’s Tenkasi district, where the company had been operating an office for nearly a decade, was not made on the spur of the moment. The Zoho Schools of Learning, in fact, are part of a larger strategy for rural revival in India, which Zoho claims is laying the groundwork for with projects like the Zoho Schools of Learning. This in-house training programme, which has locations in Chennai and Tenkasi, provides school graduates and high school certificate holders with 18 months of training in a variety of subjects before they are absorbed by Zoho.
Furthermore, the company has stated that within the next five years, half of its over 10,000 employees will work from smaller, rural centres, similar to the 20-plus centres it currently has across Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala, allowing them to stay connected to their towns and villages while working in world-class jobs. This may sound familiar in a post-pandemic world where returning to one’s hometown or village is common, but Zoho thought of it a decade ago.
During this year’s pandemic-induced lockdown, Vembu also built a primary school in the village, where he regularly provided hands-on education. Is he the architect of Tenkasi’s most daring economic, social, and cultural experiment? Vembu bursts out laughing, as if he’s been discovered. In India, these issues cannot be addressed piecemeal. Agriculture will not be solved until manufacturing and skilling issues are addressed, and those issues will not be addressed until education and healthcare issues are addressed.
The pandemic, according to Vembu, has caused the company to rethink its approach to personal-use software. While the company’s key products, such as Zoho CRM, a top-rated customer relationship management (CRM) platform utilised by over 250,000 organisations in 180 countries, have predominantly targeted businesses, the moment may have come to try reaching out to individual customers. While the firm hasn’t gone all out with marketing, Arattai, Zoho’s cross-platform messaging app, was unveiled in January 2020 as a first step in this direction. Employees utilised the app named ‘Arattai,’ which translates to ‘chitchat,’ for internal communication.
The beginnings of Zoho — and Vembu — were unremarkable. In the late 1990s, Zoho, like many other digital enterprises, started as a “bedroom operation” in Silicon Valley. After graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and receiving master’s and PhD degrees from Princeton, Vembu worked as a wireless engineer at Qualcomm in San Diego, California. When Zoho’s co-founder, Tony Thomas, asked whether he knew anyone who could help him sell the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) software he was developing, Vembu accepted despite having no experience in marketing or sales.
Vembu founded Zoho University in 2005 after failing to attract top talent from prestigious universities. Low-income high school graduates (12th grade) were taught computer programming here and were offered jobs at Zoho after completing the course.
The company has over one million customers by 2008. In May 2009, the company was renamed Zoho Corporation.
Zoho now has more than 40 products to help organisations with everything from sales and marketing to accounting and customer service. One of their distinctive selling factors is the inexpensive cost of their cloud-based software bundle. The United States has the company’s largest customer base.
Vembu has never had to rely on venture capitalists or an initial public offering (IPO), and it is entirely self-funded.
In October 2019, Vembu travelled from San Francisco to Mathalamparai, a village in Tenkasi district, about 650 kilometres from Chennai, to combat the trend of people leaving rural areas for better job opportunities in cities. He works from a rural office set up in the village by his company.
His company employs approximately 500 people and operates from two separate locations and aims to ease business daily tasks with more such developments in this sector ut, the bottomline of the story is, Vembu’s efforts are worth all appreciation.
