New Delhi: The online Zoho Office suite and other business software are produced by Zoho Corporation (formerly AdventNet Inc.), whose creator and CEO is Sridhar Vembu. He is known for starting from zero and raising millions of dollars for Zoho Corporation, which is currently owned by Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Salesforce.
The smartest unknown Indian entrepreneur who has a huge fan base in start-up business, mostly because he refused venture capital funding.
Sridhar Vembu Family Background
Sridhar comes from a very modest middle-class family in Chennai, where his mother was a stay-at-home mom and his father worked as a stenographer in the High Court. Neither of them went to college.
Sridhar Vembu Education
After completing class 10th in a government-funded school with Tamil language curriculum, he transferred to IIT-Madras to complete his graduation. After that, in 1989, he also obtained an electrical engineering degree from Princeton University.
Sridhar Vembu Professional Career
In San Diego, Sridhar joined Qualcomm in 1994. Being an electrical engineer, he worked on wireless communication during this period of about two years, which included CDMA, power control and some really complex wireless communication challenges.
Zoho Corporation Journey
Sridhar Vembu had a strong interest in political science and economics at Princeton, which led him to read many books and research the growth strategies used by successful economies such as Singapore, Taiwan and Japan.
He knew that socialism was India’s issue and was sincerely motivated to set things right. So when his brother Kumar put forth the idea two years later, he decided to join him, quit his job, and return to his native country in an effort to use technology to alleviate some of the country’s problems.
Tony Thomas, who had some network management software and was knowledgeable in the area, joined forces with them. Together, they launched Vembu Software in 1996 from a modest flat in the suburbs of Chennai.
After experiencing ups and downs, the company has finally been recognized to be expanding at an electrifying rate. In 2016, revenue grew from $300 million with 12 million users in 2015 to $500 million with 18 million users, with consumers located in the Americas, Europe, West Asia, and Japan.