Zoho Is Proudly Made In India, Says Founder Sridhar Vembu
Sridhar Vembu, founder and former CEO of Zoho Corporation , on Tuesday addressed public concerns and widespread misinformation about the company’s product development, data hosting, and operations.
In a detailed post on X, Vembu clarified that Zoho is entirely developed in India, pays its global taxes in India, and does not rely on cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure for hosting.
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The clarification came at a time when questions were circulating on social media and in industry circles about whether Zoho was truly a “Made in India” product, where its customer data was stored, and how its messaging app Arattai was being run.
Vembu asserted that every Zoho product is developed in India. “Our global headquarters is in Chennai and we pay taxes in India on our global income,” he wrote. While Zoho operates in more than 80 countries and has a strong customer base in the United States, the development and technical backbone remain firmly in India.
There are questions about where Zoho is developed and where the data is hosted and who hosts it. There is a lot of false information we want to correct.
1. All the products are developed in India. Our global headquarters is in Chennai and we pay taxes in India on our global…
— Sridhar Vembu (@svembu) September 30, 2025
On data storage, Vembu assured users that Indian customer data is hosted in India, specifically in data centres located in Mumbai, Delhi, and Chennai, with an additional facility coming up in Odisha. Globally, Zoho maintains over 18 data centres, each responsible for hosting regional or national data. “We are committed to hosting each country’s data in their own jurisdiction,” Vembu said, emphasising compliance with local laws and sovereignty.
Vembu also underlined that Zoho’s services run on its own hardware and proprietary software frameworks, built on top of open-source technologies such as Linux OS and Postgres database. Importantly, he noted that Zoho products, including Arattai, are not hosted on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Instead, Zoho only uses certain nodes from those services for traffic optimisation across regions, but never for data storage. “We are adding many such points of presence (POPs) as we speak,” he added.
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Addressing rumours about pricing, Vembu confirmed that Arattai, Zoho’s homegrown messaging app, will remain free of cost. He said the company is able to sustain this model because of heavy investment in research and development that reduces costs around compute, bandwidth, storage, and energy. “We want our services to be efficient and sustainable in the long term,” Vembu explained.
One source of confusion for users was Zoho’s developer account listing a US office address in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Vembu clarified that this was a legacy issue. The accounts were originally registered in the early days of these platforms by a Zoho employee based in the United States for testing purposes, and the company simply never updated the address.
Concluding his message, Vembu reaffirmed Zoho’s identity as an Indian corporation with worldwide operations. “We are proudly ‘Made in India, Made for the World,’ and we mean it,” he said, stressing that Zoho’s growth strategy is rooted in India while serving businesses across the globe.
