In February 2026, Zoho Corporation marked its 30th year with two numbers most software companies would envy: more than one million paying customers and more than 150 million users worldwide. It said revenue grew 20% in 2025 and customers grew 32%. What makes the story unusual is not the size. It is that Zoho got there without taking a single rupee or dollar of outside investment.
The man most closely tied to that choice is co-founder Sridhar Vembu, who now spends much of his time far from any tech hub, in a village in Tenkasi district of Tamil Nadu.
The early years
Vembu was born in 1968 in a village in Thanjavur district and grew up in a middle-class family. He studied electrical engineering at IIT Madras, graduating in 1989, and then went to Princeton University for a master’s and a PhD, finishing his doctoral thesis in 1994.
His first job was as a wireless engineer at Qualcomm in San Diego. He later moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. A comfortable career in American tech was right there for him, but he wanted to build something of his own.
The idea
In 1996, Vembu and Tony Thomas started a company called AdventNet, with two of Vembu’s brothers also involved. Its first product was WebNMS, software that helps companies manage telecom and computer networks. It was dull, useful, business-to-business work, and it paid the bills.
In 2002 the company started ManageEngine, a division for IT management tools. Over the years it moved into cloud applications for email, accounting, CRM and office work. That online suite was called Zoho, and in 2009 the whole company took the name Zoho Corporation.
The hard part
Staying bootstrapped sounds romantic, but it means every hire and every new product has to be paid for out of what customers pay you. There is no fresh funding round to cover a bad year. Zoho chose to keep building its own software stack in-house rather than buy or rent large parts of it, which is slower and costs more up front.
It also made a bet on people that many saw as odd. In 2004 it set up Zoho Schools, which trains young people, many from rural homes and without college degrees, to become software developers. In 2011 it opened an office in Tenkasi, where its help desk product Zoho Desk was built. Another rural office followed at Renigunta in Andhra Pradesh in 2018.
In 2019 Vembu moved from the Bay Area to Mathalamparai, a village in Tenkasi district. The same year Zoho shifted its US headquarters from Pleasanton, California, to Del Valle, Texas.
How it grew
Growth came steadily rather than in jumps. By its 30th anniversary, Zoho said it had 19,000 employees and more than 90 offices in 28 countries, with its main base in Chennai. It now runs four brands: Zoho, ManageEngine, Qntrl and TrainerCentral.
For the year ended March 2025 (FY25), Zoho’s Indian entity reported revenue of about Rs 12,313 crore, up roughly 18%, according to filings reported in April 2026. Net profit was Rs 3,191 crore, slightly lower than Rs 3,299 crore in FY24 as costs rose. For a company with no investors to answer to, that level of profit is what funds the next round of building.
Not every bet has landed cleanly. Zoho’s messaging app Arattai, launched in January 2021, saw a surge of sign-ups in 2025 after government officials promoted it as a homegrown option, but critics pointed out that its chats lacked end-to-end encryption at the time.
Where it stands now
In January 2025, Shailesh Kumar Davey took over as group CEO and Vembu became chief scientist, focusing on research and development. Vembu received the Padma Shri in 2021. In Forbes India’s rich list of October 2025, Vembu and his siblings were placed 51st with an estimated net worth of US$6 billion.
In Zoho’s anniversary announcement, Vembu summed up the model plainly: “Being bootstrapped, private, and built entirely in-house makes Zoho an outlier among competitors.”
Lessons for founders
- Profit buys freedom. Without investors, Zoho could take long bets like rural offices and its own tech stack.
- Boring products can build big companies. Network management software was not glamorous, but it gave Zoho a base to grow from.
- Talent is everywhere. Zoho Schools and village offices show that skill can be trained, not only hired from top colleges.
- Hand over in time. Moving the CEO role to Davey let Vembu go back to research.
Reporting based on Zoho’s 30th anniversary announcement (Business Wire, Feb 2026), Angel One and OfficeChai on FY25 results, and background from Wikipedia’s Zoho and Sridhar Vembu pages.
Featured image: Shajinss, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
