Chennai-based SAAS firm Zoho has surpassed 100 million million users across over 55 business applications. The landmark comes less than a year since the company announced, in November, that achieved $1 billion in revenue. The milestone also makes Zoho Corp the first-ever bootstrapped SAAS company to serve 100 million users.
"I want to thank all our customers for trusting us with their business and helping us reach 100 million users worldwide," said Zoho's co-founder and CEO, Sridhar Vembu, in a statement, "This is an impressive milestone for any organisation, but is particularly sweet for us — a bootstrapped company that has never raised external capital."
The last few years have seen Zoho Corp register prolific growth on the sales and user-count front. For context, it surpassed the 1-million user-count mark in 2008. Its last 50 million users were on-boarded in only the last five years. The company has also made rapid strides in the enterprise, or the "upmarket" segment, in India, with a 3-year CAGR of 65 percent.
Today, Zoho supports over 7 lakh businesses across more than 150 countries, with India continuing to be one of the fastest-growing among the lot. In June, CNBC-TV18 reported that the company was looking to pivot its market presence in India, so as to focus on the enterprise segment, and capitalize on its exponential growth and market presence, in India.
"We are not done yet — we have an impressive innovation pipeline covering the next 10 years and are investing in deep technologies to serve billions of users around the world," Sridhar added, "We're working towards it."
In 2017, Zoho Corp made headlines when it integrated all its apps on one platform, which it marketed as Zoho One. Around the same time, the company saw a tectonic shift in location when it decided to open a development centre in Tenkasi, Tamil Nadu. Sridhar himself shifted base from the US to the town, often speaking passionately about continuing to write the Zoho story from rural Tamil Nadu.
In an exclusive chat with CNBC-TV18 earlier this year, Sridhar said that Zoho was not looking to lay employees off even in the face of slowing revenue growth. “We expect difficult economic conditions to continue and are not out of the woods, our growth rates have reduced from 30 percent to between 12 and 15 percent,” he said in April, “But our employees need not worry about losing jobs.”
