Sridhar Vembu is the founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Zoho Corporation (previously AdventNet Inc), a maker of cloud-based business software. As of October 2022, Sridhar Vembu has a $3.8B net worth, according to Forbes.
Vembu is best known for establishing the multimillion-dollar Zoho Corporation from scratch and without any external capital, which now competes directly with industry giants such as Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Salesforce.com.
Vembu's company Zoho grew 38% in the past year to hit 80 million global users as of July 2022.
In 2021, Vembu was named the 55th richest person in India with a net worth of $3.75 billion, according to Forbes.
Vembu began his career in 1994, working for Qualcomm as a wireless engineer in San Diego, California.
During his post-graduation days at Princeton, he developed a strong interest in Political Science and Economics, leading him to read a number of books and research the success of markets such as Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan, as well as how they had managed to expand so well. Later he acknowledged that India's problem was socialism, and he was determined to correct the situation. So, in 1996, Vembu, along with his sibling founded a software development house for network equipment providers called AdventNet. In 2009, AdventNet was renamed as Zoho Corporation, focusing on providing SaaS support to Customer relationship management services.
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As of 2020, Vembu held an 88 percent stake in the company. In the last two years, Zoho added 59 offices. In 2021, Sridhar Vembu was appointed to the National Security Advisory Board(NSAB) of India.
In May 2022, Vembu's company, Zoho invested $2.5 million in startup Genrobotics which is working on solutions to eliminate manual scavenging.
Sridhar Vembu runs the in-house Zoho University, which provides training to students who have completed 12th grade and have certain math and tech skills. Additionally, he funds a school for rural kids in southern Tamil Nadu.
In 2019, Sridhar Vembu was awarded the Ernst & Young "Entrepreneur of the Year Award" in India. In 2021, Vembu was awarded India's fourth-highest civilian award, the Padma Shri.
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Sridhar Vembu was born in 1968 in a middle-class household in Thanjavur district, Tamil Nadu. Vembu received his early education in a Tamil-medium government-aided school until the tenth grade. He did his graduation in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Following this, he earned his MS and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University in New Jersey, in 1989. He is married and lives in Tenkasi, India.
