Founder of Zoho Corporation: Sridhar Vembu Biography

Sridhar Vembu is the founder of the global software company Zoho Corporation. He graduated from IIT-Madras and worked at Qualcomm. Vembu is known for the “Bootstrapped” philosophy. 

Sridhar Vembu Biography

Name	Sridhar Vembu
Date of Birth	1968 (date unknown)
Place of Birth	Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu
Father	Sambamurthy Vembu
Mother	Unknown
Siblings	Radha Vembu (Sister), Sekhar Vembu (Brother)
Education	IIT-Madras, Princeton University
Spouse	Pramila Srinivasan
Notable award	Padma Shri (2021)

 

Early life

• Vembu was born in 1968 in the Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu. His father worked as a stenographer at the High Court in Chennai, and his mother was a homemaker. He came from a middle-class family, and his parents emphasized education. Vembu was studious and excelled at academics.
• He attended a Tamil-medium school in which he performed exceptionally well. In 1989, he went to the prestigious IIT Madras to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. He completed his Master’s and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Princeton University in 1994.

Career 

• After the completion of his Ph.D., he worked at Qualcomm for two years as a wireless engineer. In 1996, he co-founded AdventNet with his brothers and a friend, which functioned on personal savings. It was a software development company that provided network management.
• After the dot-com crash in the 2000s, they diverted their focus to cloud-based business software. This marked the start of Zoho Corporation in 2009. The company moved to Tenkasi, India, in 2019. 
• The company has been bootstrapped by Vembu and his co-founder, Tony Thomas, to resist any foreign interference. Sridhar Vembu was appointed to the National Security Advisory Board in 2021. 
  

Philanthropy

• Sridhar Vembu’s preference to establish offices in suburban and rural areas shows his commitment to uplift rural India and prove that not every company needs to be headquartered in a metropolitan city. Zoho offices are in rural Mathalamparai and Renigunta in Andhra Pradesh.
• To empower local talent and children from underprivileged backgrounds, Zoho schools were established to offer a vocational training program that provides quality education and serves as a major source of selecting candidates to work in the company. 

Awards and Recognition 

Sridhar Vembu was awarded the Padma Shri in 2021, India’s fourth-highest civilian honor, for his work in the field of commerce and industry. He won the Entrepreneur of the Year award by Ernst & Young in India in 2019. He bagged the award of Indian of the Year in 2022 by CNN-News18.

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