'Can’t face quarter to quarter pressure': Sridhar Vembu slams push to list Zoho after Arattai surge
The homegrown messaging app Arattai, which just saw a 100x spike in user traffic over three days—surging from 3,000 to 350,000 sign-ups per day—was born out of what Vembu calls a “hopelessly foolish” idea.
- Sep 29, 2025,
- Updated Sep 29, 2025 6:37 AM IST
Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu pushed back against calls for his company to go public, arguing that investor pressure would kill the kind of long-term engineering bets that define the firm’s identity.
Reacting on X to a post urging Zoho to list, Vembu said, “Let me state the reality: Arattai would very likely not have been built by a public company that faces quarter to quarter financial pressure.”
The homegrown messaging app Arattai, which just saw a 100x spike in user traffic over three days—surging from 3,000 to 350,000 sign-ups per day—was born out of what Vembu calls a “hopelessly foolish” idea. “Even our employees had expressed scepticism that Arattai would ever gain any traction,” he admitted.
But that didn’t stop Zoho from building it.
“We felt we need that kind of engineering capability in Bharat,” Vembu said, adding, “We need a lot lot more of such capabilities… and we are on it.”
Zoho, a $1 billion-plus SaaS firm, is known for its low-profile yet fiercely independent stance. Vembu underscored that the company operates like an “industrial research lab that also makes money to fund itself,” prioritizing long-term R&D over quarterly gains.
Among its active projects: compilers, databases, OS development, hardware, chip design, and robotics. Zoho has also backed deep-tech startups with no immediate revenue prospects.
Vembu made clear why the company avoids public markets: “In public markets, private equity and other such financial players would get in and they would want 'shareholder value'! That pressure eventually leads company managements to focus only on numbers to please them.”
He linked Zoho’s contrarian strategy to a cultural ethos. “We have a culture of founders and senior executives living frugally, like how good scientists and engineers in ISRO would live. To us that is the essence of Bharat,” he said, drawing parallels to post-war Japan’s development model.
Arattai’s sudden popularity has pushed Zoho into emergency mode. “We are adding infrastructure on an emergency basis… as we add a lot more infrastructure, we are also fine tuning and updating the code to fix issues as they arise,” he wrote, noting that a major release with new features was originally planned for November.
Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu pushed back against calls for his company to go public, arguing that investor pressure would kill the kind of long-term engineering bets that define the firm’s identity.
Reacting on X to a post urging Zoho to list, Vembu said, “Let me state the reality: Arattai would very likely not have been built by a public company that faces quarter to quarter financial pressure.”
The homegrown messaging app Arattai, which just saw a 100x spike in user traffic over three days—surging from 3,000 to 350,000 sign-ups per day—was born out of what Vembu calls a “hopelessly foolish” idea. “Even our employees had expressed scepticism that Arattai would ever gain any traction,” he admitted.
But that didn’t stop Zoho from building it.
“We felt we need that kind of engineering capability in Bharat,” Vembu said, adding, “We need a lot lot more of such capabilities… and we are on it.”
Zoho, a $1 billion-plus SaaS firm, is known for its low-profile yet fiercely independent stance. Vembu underscored that the company operates like an “industrial research lab that also makes money to fund itself,” prioritizing long-term R&D over quarterly gains.
Among its active projects: compilers, databases, OS development, hardware, chip design, and robotics. Zoho has also backed deep-tech startups with no immediate revenue prospects.
Vembu made clear why the company avoids public markets: “In public markets, private equity and other such financial players would get in and they would want 'shareholder value'! That pressure eventually leads company managements to focus only on numbers to please them.”
He linked Zoho’s contrarian strategy to a cultural ethos. “We have a culture of founders and senior executives living frugally, like how good scientists and engineers in ISRO would live. To us that is the essence of Bharat,” he said, drawing parallels to post-war Japan’s development model.
Arattai’s sudden popularity has pushed Zoho into emergency mode. “We are adding infrastructure on an emergency basis… as we add a lot more infrastructure, we are also fine tuning and updating the code to fix issues as they arise,” he wrote, noting that a major release with new features was originally planned for November.