Zoho Corporation Focuses on Developing Technology for Related Industries with R&D Team

• ByStartupStory     |    April 5, 2023

A portion of Zoho Corporation‘s efforts are going towards developing technology for a number of related industries. Co-founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu reveals that a number of these projects are being worked on by the Zoho research and development (R&D) team.

“There’s no recipe or formula to it. If it were, everybody would do it. In any real R&D project, often in project management, people give the analogy of trains arriving on time. But that’s not the right analogy. The right analogy is cutting a path through an unknown jungle and territory. Or as the phrase goes—‘unknown unknowns’,” says Vembu.

He continues by saying that Zoho is engaged in early-stage projects through investments, partnerships, or self-initiative. These include advancements in telemedicine, computer-aided design, and farming (such as developing drones to chase away wild boars that destroy crops and automatic watering systems). For the latter, Vembu claims that in response to Coimbatore industrialists having to deal with the issue of paying exorbitant sums to monopolistic players, he has assembled a team to develop cloud-based solutions.

“Those are areas that we are not present in today. We don’t have a lot of experience in it. But that doesn’t deter us; we will get into it, we will learn, and we’ll figure it out. And we’ll give stiff competition (to other players),” he adds.

 

The entrepreneur claims that in order to explore synergies and jointly develop technology, Zoho has invested in or is collaborating with a number of businesses. These companies include GenRobotics, Boson Motors, Signalchip (a fabless semiconductor manufacturer), and Ultraviolette (a startup EV company) (deep tech startup). The business’s Zoho Labs R&D division is creating data centre hardware in Nagpur. Both Zoho’s R&D team and its portfolio of businesses frequently collaborate on solving some of the same issues. According to the CEO of the company, Zoho invests twice as much in development as it does in marketing.

“Look at the opportunity, right? Microsoft is $200-plus billion (company), Apple is $400 billion. So we’re half a percent of Microsoft and a quarter of a percent of Apple. We still have a long way to go. So, it’s a huge opportunity. We have to invest a lot more. That’s how I think about it,” says Vembu.

Follow Startup Story