Billionaire Sridhar Vembu - The brain behind Zoho Corporation

A man with simplicity and vision has created a product-based IT company and succeeded in the journey by delivering top class software products.

Sridhar Vembu has a net worth of US$ 2.44 billion (Rupees – 17,940 Crore), making him one of the richest men in India. He is the 59th richest Indian and was awarded India’s fourth-highest civilian award, the Padma Shri, in 2021.

He is an Indian Business tycoon founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Zoho Corporation, focusing on providing SaaS support to Customer relationship management services.

Zoho – Top class products at a cheaper price

Vembu has followed a number of unique strategies to build Zoho. These include creating a product that is very similar to Salesforce's customer relationship management product but dramatically slashed the pricing on it, making it affordable and attractive for small businesses. 

Over time, Zoho has applied the same model of copying successful products by Google, Microsoft, etc to create a broad portfolio that caters to small businesses very effectively.  

Zoho digitises businesses with apps that handle tasks ranging from customer acquisition and management to sales and customer support and has 4.5 crore users across 180 countries.

Zoho has more than 40 apps for its Zoho One product alone. Vembu says his vision for Zoho is that it will be the software that drives all functions for businesses from sales to finance with competitive pricing from US$1 per employee a day.

Exceptional educational background

Sridhar Vembu born on 1968 at Tanjore, Tamil Nadu. In 1989, he did Bachelor in Electrical Engineering from the IIT, Madras. Later, he studied MS and PhD degrees from Princeton University in New Jersey. 

In 1994, Sridhar started his career at Qualcomm as a wireless engineer in San Diego, California. He saw opportunities for software business in India, within two years, in 1996, Vembu founded a software development house for network equipment providers called AdventNet with two siblings and three friends. In 2009, the company was renamed Zoho Corporation.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic struck India, he moved to Mathalamparai, a village near Tenkasi. The motive was to encourage more people facilities to shift to villages as Indian cities have started to face major challenges. 

Such a fascinating story, In India he is one of the leading startup founders in IT products space, and that gave inspiration and pathway to lot of other IT startup founders.