When Home Minister Amit Shah revealed his new official email address ending in @zoho.in, it marked a significant moment for India’s technology ecosystem. This came after Communications Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and officials from the Education Ministry, including Minister Anand Pradhan, also began using Zoho’s office suite for government work, signaling a shift away from foreign software like Microsoft Office and Google Workspace.
At the centre of this move is Sridhar Vembu, the founder of Zoho Corporation, a company built from scratch in India that has quietly grown into a global software provider.
Vembu, 57, was born in the Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu. He graduated in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and later completed a PhD from Princeton University. After working at Qualcomm in the United States, he co-founded AdventNet in 1996, which later became Zoho Corporation.
Zoho develops a wide range of cloud-based tools used by businesses across the world – from email and document creation to accounting and customer management. Today, the company serves over 100 million users globally. Unlike most technology firms of its scale, Zoho has expanded without venture capital funding, relying solely on its own profits. In 2019, Vembu moved from the US to Mathalamparai, a small village in Tamil Nadu’s Tenkasi district, and began running large parts of Zoho’s operations from there. The company has opened rural offices in TN and Andhra Pradesh, employing thousands trained through its Zoho Schools of Learning.
