Sridhar Vembu steps down as Zoho’s CEO, takes up chief scientist role
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) firm Zoho Corp’s co-founder Sridhar Vembu today announced that he will be stepping down from the position of chief executive officer. Zoho’s other two co-founders – Shailesh Kumar Davey and Tony Thomas – will take over as group CEO and Zoho US lead, respectively. Additionally, Rajesh Ganesan will lead our ManageEngine division and Mani Vembu will lead the Zoho.com division.
Vembu wrote in a post on “X” that he is taking the decision in view of the recent technological developments, especially artificial intelligence (AI). He will now be working as the chief scientist at the firm, turning focus to the R&D initiatives, along with his personal rural development mission.
“The future of our company entirely depends on how well we navigate the R&D challenge and I am looking forward to my new assignment with energy and vigor. I am also very happy to get back to hands-on technical work,” wrote Vembu.
Zoho was incorporated in 1996 and Vembu took over as the CEO in 2000 and has been based in Tenakasi in Tamil Nadu. Zoho offers a wide range of products, including customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), productivity tools, and collaboration applications. In 2022, the bootstrapped company became a billion-dollar company.
Vembu is a big proponent of AI, as evident from his past media interactions and social media posts. Last year, Zoho announced at the NVIDIA AI Summit in Mumbai that it would leverage the chipmaker’s AI enterprise software NeMo to develop and deploy language models for its SaaS platforms. The company has already spent over $10 million on NVIDIA AI solutions, and plans to invest $10 million more.