Sridhar Vembu is a Padma Shri recipient and the CEO of multimillion dollar software company, Zoho Corporation.
Hailing from a middle-class Tamil family, he completed his Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from IIT-Madras. He then went to Princeton for his MS and PhD. Mr. Vembu started his professional career working as a wireless engineer in Qualcomm, California.
In 1996, he founded a software development house for network equipment providers with his brothers and friends, called AdventNet, which was renamed to Zoho Corporation in 2009. The company focusses on providing SaaS support to customer relationship management services. Zoho Corp., has offices in USA, Singapore, Japan, China and India.
Mr. Vembu is credited with taking software and product development functions from urban centers into rural villages in India. Specifically, his company established its offices in rural Mathalamparai, Tenkasi district, Tamil Nadu and in suburban Renigunta, Andhra Pradesh.
In 2004, he set up Zoho Schools to provide vocational software development education to rural students as an alternative to formal university education.
Mr. Vembu was appointed to the National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) in 2021.
He was awarded the Ernst and Young ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ Award in 2019. He has also been selected as CNN-News18’s Indian of the Year 2022.