Zoho’s Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu on September 30 clarified that he wants the company’s breakout messaging app to be “interoperable like UPI and email” and not closed like rival WhatsApp. In a post on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Vembu added: “We do not want to be a monopoly ever”.
Sridhar Vembu on his vision for Arattai
In a post on X, early on September 30, Vembu wrote, “On Arattai, we have initiated discussions with Sharad Sharma of iSpirt, the group that did the technical work to make UPI happen, to standardize and publish the messaging protocols.”
Giving the reason, Vembu added, “I am a huge fan of UPI and hugely respect the work the team did. Sharad is a good friend and he will guide us in this objective.”
He noted that Arattai’s “systems need to be interoperable like UPI and email and not closed like WhatsApp”, adding: “We do not want to be a monopoly ever. We are committed to that goal and we will work with iSpirt to make this happen.”
‘Make in India, Make for the World’: Sridhar Vembu on Zoho
Later in the day, he addressed “false information” about Zoho, and clarified that the company is based in Chennai, India, and all its products are developed in the country.
Vembu wrote: “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.”
- As per Vembu, all of Zoho’s products are developed in India. “Our global headquarters is in Chennai and we pay taxes in India on our global income. As a global corporation headquartered in India, we have offices in over 80 countries and have a strong presence in the US which is a big market for us,” he stated.
- He said that Indian customer data is hosted in India (Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai, soon Odissa), adding, “We have over 18 data centers globally and they host the respective country or regional data. We are committed to hosting each country data in their own jurisdiction.”
- About Zoho’s services, Vembu clarified, “All our services run on hardware we own and software frameworks we developed, on top of open source like Linux OS and Postgres database.”
- He added that Zoho does not host products on AWS or Azure. Specifically, for Arattai, he said they are not using GCloud, AWS, or Azure. “We use some of those services for regional switching nodes to speed up traffic but data is not stored in them. We are adding many such “points of presence” (POPs) as we speak,” he added.
- On the Zoho office address in the App Store and Play Store showing as US, he clarified that this is “because the account was registered in the very early days of those stores by one of our employees in the US just to test them out. We never changed that.”
“We are proudly “Made in India, Made for the World” and we mean it,” he ended.
Arattai’s gains attention for massive growth over short span
The Arattai app’s daily sign-ups have soared from 3,000 to 3,50,000 within only three days, a staggering 100-fold increase. Vembu shared that to meet demand, Zoho’s teams are working around the clock to scale infrastructure and resolve technical issues triggered by the sudden spike.
“We are adding infrastructure on an emergency basis for another potential 100x peak surge. That is how exponentials work,” he wrote on X, noting that the growth came months ahead of a planned November roll-out of new features and marketing campaigns.
An Indian-built messaging app launched in 2021, Arattai recently climbed to the top of the country’s app charts, inviting comparisons with WhatsApp. Yet, only the test of time can answer if it can beat how deeply woven WhatsApp is into everyday life in India.
Zoho promotes Arattai as a privacy-first service, with all user data stored in India. Voice and video calls are already end-to-end encrypted, while standard messages currently lack this safeguard. A ‘secret chat’ option does offer secure messaging, and full encryption is said to be on the way. Arattai must now convert downloads into regular use, bridge feature gaps, and prove its long-term dependability. Otherwise, its current spike in popularity may fade as quickly as it appeared.
