Article · 12 min read

Zoho's Unconventional Path: Building a Global Tech Giant from India's Heartland

Aanchal Ghatak · Dataquest India Free Intermediate India

Vembu built a global software company from Tenkasi with no outside funding, and this interview is him explaining the structural choices behind it: rural R&D hubs, domain specific rather than frontier AI models, no layoffs. It is the strongest existing proof that where you sell from matters less than what your cost structure lets you outlast.

• Zoho bets on domain-specific models, which often outperform the larger foundational ones.
• Customer data is never co-mingled to train models; each model is tailored to one customer.
• The company pledged to avoid layoffs and redeploy people to emerging areas instead.
• It has an application pending under India's PLI scheme to build a semiconductor fab.