Sridhar Vembu has written that Zoho's networking-software customers once shrank from over 150 to three. It was the dotcom bust, and some co-founders were leaving to pursue their own projects.
He grew up in a village in Thanjavur district, Tamil Nadu, born in 1968. He studied electrical engineering at IIT Madras and then went to Princeton for his PhD, finishing in 1994. In the early 1990s he was at Qualcomm in California, staying with his brother Kumar. In his own telling, shopping trips bothered them: shelves full of Taiwanese goods and nothing from India. In 1996 they started AdventNet. In an interview with Sridhar Kumudam, he recalled that their parents were worried that two of their sons had come home without a job.
In his own telling, shopping trips bothered them: shelves full of Taiwanese goods and nothing from India.
The bust was the near-death. Secondary accounts report that he turned down an offer of about ₹150 crore to sell, and went without his own salary for four years, paying people from the company's cash reserves. What he draws from it, in his own words, is "we cannot rely on one market." That led to ManageEngine in 2003 and Zoho.com in 2005.
The refusal of venture money came from a different moment. A VC once offered investment with a clause requiring an exit or liquidity guarantee within a set period. When he questioned it, he was told it was a standard clause. He could not promise an exit, so Zoho stayed bootstrapped. He now calls that a "fortunate moment" and says money always comes with strings attached.
Then he did the unfashionable thing. In 2019 he left the Bay Area for rural Tenkasi, where Zoho opened offices in villages like Mathalamparai. In January 2025 he stepped aside as CEO for Shailesh Kumar Davey and became Chief Scientist. FY2025 revenue was ₹12,313 crore, net income ₹3,191 crore, with over 120 million users.
Trouble hasn't left him. The 2020 IP lawsuit against Freshworks, founded by former Zoho staff, settled in 2021. In 2026 Zoho reportedly froze salary hikes to avoid layoffs, and a California court ordered him to post a $1.7 billion bond in his divorce case. He also has a son with autism.
For founders, the striking thing is how ordinary the decisive acts were. Not a clever pivot or a famous raise, but a refusal to sign terms he could not honour, and a willingness to live on the company's own cash until customers came back.