Dear Reader,

Zoho is having its moment. From IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw endorsing the SaaS giant’s software stack for official use to home minister Amit Shah announcing a switch to Zoho Mail in a Trumpesque post, Zoho has become the face of India’s latest “swadeshi” tech push.

The sudden spotlight marks quite a shift for the Chennai-based tech giant that’s spent 28 years thriving under the radar, building over 50 business apps, serving 100 Mn users worldwide, and generating $1 Bn in revenue — all without raising venture capital.

But Zoho is now under the spotlight after a few catalysts, including the India-US trade tensions, a call for sovereign tech and AI models, as well as the quest to create India’s own Microsoft, Google and Meta.

From developing a large language model (LLM) to reviving WhatsApp rival Arattai, the SaaS unicorn appears to be decked up for India’s sovereign tech moment.

And alongside this, Zoho’s push into robotics and its entry into fintech hint that the company has much bigger plans in the pipeline that are not just aligned to expanding its own universe, but also taking India’s tech global and building alternatives to foreign software.

So, beyond the hype, flashy vanity metrics for Arratai and government endorsement lie a more nuanced question – can Zoho challenge the might of deep-pocketed American tech giants?

Zoho’s Star Power

Unlike India’s previous digital nationalist experiments, which often amounted to clones of Western platforms (think Koo vs X or Twitter), Zoho has spent two decades quietly building industrial-grade software infrastructure.

The company runs its entire operation on proprietary servers built and maintained by Indian engineers, hosts local data exclusively on Indian data centres, and pays taxes in the country on its worldwide income – a trifecta of sovereignty credentials no foreign competitor can match.

On top of it, Zoho crossed $1 Bn in revenue and achieved........

© Inc42