Three days. That’s all it took for Arattai, Zoho’s homegrown messaging app, to go from a low-key experiment to a phenomenon. In September, sign-ups shot up from 3,000 a day to 330,000—a 100-fold surge that forced the company to add infrastructure and fine-tuning code on the fly. The team had planned a big release for November—with new features and a marketing push. Instead, they found themselves in the middle of an exponential storm, working flat out to keep pace.

The trigger? A public endorsement from Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on September 24, urging citizens to adopt Indian-made apps under the Swadeshi push. Days earlier, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced he had switched to Zoho’s productivity suite for official work. These catapulted Arattai—Tamil for ‘casual chat’—to the top of app store charts, ahead of WhatsApp and others.

Launched in 2021, Arattai now sells itself on two promises: Spyware-free and Made in India. In a market where Meta-owned WhatsApp faces scrutiny for monetising user data, Zoho pledges never to sell or mine personal information. All data stays in India, and the app remains ad-free. Its look and feel mirror WhatsApp, but with a privacy-first philosophy—and now also with end-to-end encryption for calls and direct chats.

The company has plans for a Zoho Pay integration, allowing users to make UPI payments, transfer money and pay bills within the chat interface—a move that positions Arattai as a challenger to Paytm, Google Pay and WhatsApp Pay.

Next, Zoho is embedding AI-powered features through its in-house Zia AI, offering smart replies, predictive typing and language translation. Regional language support and voice assistants are also on the roadmap to deepen adoption beyond metros. Finally, Zoho aims to integrate Arattai with its broader suite of productivity tools, creating a seamless bridge between personal and business communication.

Over almost three decades, Zoho has brought to the market more than 55 products and services powering businesses globally—CRM, finance, HR, and productivity tools used by over 100 million users in close to 150 countries. With offices in 80 countries and data centres across the US, Europe, India and Australia, Zoho has built a global footprint. “We’ve been doing this for 30 years now—building in India for the world,” Vembu tells Forbes India in an exclusive interview.

The latest in this was the launch, earlier this year, of Zia LLM, Zoho’s proprietary large language model, trained in-house and tailored for specific business use cases. Zoho’s AI journey began over a decade ago, but the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT accelerated its push into generative AI. “About 18 months ago, internal experiments showed promising results, which led to the decision to build our own proprietary models,” says Mani Vembu, who recently took over the reins from Sridhar Vembu as CEO of Zoho.

“Most public LLMs are consumer-focussed,” says Mani. “We initially used and hosted open-source LLMs, which gave us insights into the infrastructure, investment and optimisation required. We realised that smaller models—such as 3B or 7B parameters—could be optimised for specific business use cases like summarisation across emails and support tickets........

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