Sridhar Vembu, the son of a farmer, and the founder of Zoho, one of India’s biggest software firms, was conferred the Padma Shri, a high civilian honour granted by the Government of India. He was born in a village in Thanjavur, to an agricultural family, and is the 59th richest man in the world, according to Forbes’ List 2020.
Coming from a humble background, Vembu started his software corporation called AdventNet in 1996 along with two of his brothers, after graduating from IIT Madras in 1989. He did a PhD from Princeton University and then got a job as a wireless systems engineer at Qualcomm for two years before starting his own company. In 1996, along with two of his brothers and three friends, he co-founded AdventNet. He went on to rebrand the company as Zoho Corporation in 2009. Today, Zoho has 60 million users worldwide and counts Levi’s, Amazon, Philips, Whirlpool, Ola, Xiaomi, and Zomato among its clientele.
He has been credited with having got the distinction of creating a unicorn without the aid of external funding. Zoho, meanwhile, is powering ahead. It was recently in the news for developing an alternative to WhatsApp amid privacy policy concerns surrounding the world’s largest messaging app.
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