Article · About 7 min read

How Zoho is rewriting the rules of enterprise tech

Naini Thaker · Forbes India Free Intermediate India

The present day proof that this is a policy and not a phase, with Mani Vembu confirming R&D spend still exceeds marketing spend at a billion dollar company.

  • Zoho serves over 100 million users in close to 150 countries with more than 55 products built over three decades.
  • About 20 percent of Zoho Corp's talent comes from Zoho Schools rather than campus hiring.
  • It spent 20 million dollars and used 256 NVIDIA GPUs to train its own Zia LLM in 1.3B, 2.6B and 7B sizes.
  • Arattai sign-ups jumped from 3,000 to 330,000 a day in September 2025, and Zoho takes a 10 to 15 year view on it.

The question it answers

  1. Why do operators like Nithin Kamath and Sridhar Vembu refuse to buy growth?

Read with it

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  2. The referral history, including the years incentives existed, the regulatory ban, and the striking observation that referrals... nithinkamath.me Article · About 4 min read How Zerodha grew without Advertising Nithin Kamath
  3. The clearest statement of the tradeoff in his own words: venture capital pushes spend toward sales and marketing and away from... Business Today Article · About 8 min read "If you don't invest in R&D, you won't have long term growth," says Zoho Corp's boss Sridhar Vembu Sridhar Vembu
  4. Video · 51 min Sridhar Vembu (Founder & CEO, Zoho) | Ask Me Anything Session | Inc42 Sridhar Vembu
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