One thing today in tech – Indian SaaS leader Zoho crosses 100 million users worldwide
In today’s episode we take a quick look at Zoho’s latest milestone, with the Indian SaaS leader crossing 100 million users, but first a few headlines. Headlines HeromotoCorp will invest up to Rs. 550 crore in a rights issue of Ather Energy Private Limited, the Indian two-wheeler giant told stock exchanges on Sep. 4 in a statement. Atomicwork, a cloud software provider of productivity software, has raised $11 million in seed funding led by Blume Ventures and Matrix Partners, TechCrunch reports. Richard Lobo, an executive vice president and former head of human resources at Infosys, has resigned, marking the latest in a series of top-level exits at the company, Moneycontrol reports. One thing today Zoho, India’s biggest cloud software company, has surpassed 100 million, the Chennai-to-California company said in a press release. Zoho says it is the first bootstrapped SaaS company to reach this milestone. Last year the company hit $1 billion in revenues, and Zoho is one of a handful of SaaS companies in India that are profitable. Started more than 25 years ago, the company’s growth over the last 15 years, with the rise of the cloud computing model, has taken it from 1 million users in 2008 to 100 million today. The latest 50 million users were added within the past five years. And the company sells more than 55 products to over 700,000 businesses in some 150 countries, according to its press release. “We are not done yet,” co-founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu said in the release. The company has an innovation pipeline covering the next 10 years and it is investing in deep technologies to serve billions of users around the world, he said. Zoho defines midmarket customers as companies with 250 employees each and those with a thousand or more workers as classic enterprise, or the upmarket segment. India shows a significant presence of enterprise customers adopting Zoho, CMO Praval Singh had said in an interview with Forbes India in June this year. In the SaaS business, larger customers mean more users and increased complexity, resulting in higher revenue per customer. The upmarket segment contributes over half of Zoho’s business in India, and a third of its entire business. As its products matured, larger businesses adopted its solutions. This led Zoho to establish dedicated teams with expertise in serving large companies. “We also developed an interoperable ecosystem, enabling easy integration with third-party applications through APIs, connectors, and partnerships,” Praval said in that interview. To cater to larger enterprises, the company launched the Zoho Marketplace, which has more than 1,800 extensions and garners 30,000 monthly installations. In 2018, Zoho introduced an enterprise business solutions team as trusted partners, offering assistance in digital transformation projects, from consulting to implementation and training. Zoho has focused on helping large enterprises streamline and optimise their technology stacks, addressing challenges such as integration, data silos, scalability, and flexibility. By helping customers overcome these obstacles, Zoho has played a meaningful role in supporting their growth and progress over the years, Praval says. India is one of the fastest-growing markets for Zoho, where the company has witnessed three year compounded annual growth of 65 percent in its upmarket segment. Customers in India include IIFL, Bigbasket and Tata Play Fiber. Zoho's upmarket growth in India is led by sectors such as banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), manufacturing, retail, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), pharmaceuticals, and IT. The company has collaborated with government departments and public sector units (PSUs) to support their digitalisation efforts and contribute to the modernisation of the public sector.