Sridhar Vembu

Co-founder of Zoho Corporation — the IIT-and-Princeton engineer who built a profitable, billion-dollar software company with no venture capital, trains his own engineers out of rural India, and moved his own HQ to a village.

Sridhar Vembu (b. 1968, Tamil Nadu) earned a B.Tech from IIT Madras and a PhD in electrical engineering from Princeton, worked at Qualcomm, then co-founded AdventNet in 1996 (renamed Zoho Corporation in 2009). He famously refused venture capital, building Zoho into a private, profitable software company with reported revenue around $1.4B, 1M+ paying organisations, and ~15,000 employees. He champions "transnational localism" (building from rural India), runs Zoho Schools of Learning (training engineers without college degrees), received the Padma Shri (2021), and stepped down as CEO to become Chief Scientist in January 2025.

Notable achievements

• Co-founded AdventNet (1996), now Zoho Corporation, and refused venture capital — building it profitably and privately.
• Grew Zoho to reported revenue around $1.4B, 1M+ paying organisations, and 150M+ users with ~15,000 employees.
• Pioneered "transnational localism" — moving operations and his own HQ to rural Tamil Nadu (Tenkasi).
• Built Zoho Schools of Learning, training engineers without college degrees (a meaningful share of Zoho’s workforce).
• Received the Padma Shri (2021); stepped down as CEO to Chief Scientist in January 2025 in a clean founder succession.

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