MC Interview | Zoho CEO Mani Vembu: “We want to make Arattai a super app – always believed this is something India needs"

Zoho CEO Manikandan Vembu

In a candid conversation with Moneycontrol, Zoho CEO Mani Vembu opens up about the explosive growth of Arattai, the homegrown messaging app that has seen a 100X user surge in recent months. Backed by Zoho’s two-decade-long tech foundation, Arattai is now poised for a bigger leap - not just as a chat platform, but as a potential super app tailored for India.

From data sovereignty to building for scale, Vembu discusses why India needs indigenous technology, how Arattai is clocking over 100,000 meetings and half a million calls daily, and what it takes to stand apart in a space dominated by WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram. He also shares what’s next : end-to-end encryption, secret chats, and payment integration - all while staying rooted in Zoho’s product-first, privacy-driven philosophy.

In this deep-dive interview, Vembu shines a light on Zoho’s vision of “learning by doing,” its commitment to digital self-reliance, and how Arattai is shaping up to be a key pillar in India’s tech future.

Edited excerpts: 

In the last few weeks, Zoho and your messaging app Arattai have been the talk of the town. How has this sudden attention been for your team, especially the small group quietly building Arattai all these years?

To start with, the technology powering Arattai has been part of Zoho for the last 20 years. The messaging service behind Arattai also powers Zoho’s entire suite of business apps, and we began developing it back in 2005. Over the years, we’ve invested in messaging, as well as audio and video capabilities, for example, Zoho Meeting is built on the same audio-video framework.

We also have a business messaging app called Cliq, which has been in production for some time. From 2021 to now, we’ve been focused on improving Arattai’s performance and functionality, adding features, and preparing for a wider launch later this year.

Like any product, we ensured the technology is hosted in India for data sovereignty and other compliance requirements. Even before this recent surge, Arattai was getting around 3,000 sign-ups per day. We were preparing for a broader launch in November, but the recent attention caused a sudden spike, almost 100x our usual scale.

This rapid growth created some initial challenges, particularly on the infrastructure side, because scaling servers can’t match such sudden demand. The first few days were difficult, but we’ve since brought things under control. While this is just the beginning, we’re closely monitoring adoption and retention, and the early signs are encouraging. Active users, meetings, and voice calls are all growing daily, which shows good retention. That’s our focus — high retention drives word-of-mouth growth.

At the same time, we’re also working on the next set of updates to ensure the app continues to deliver more value to users.

Was this sudden endorsement from the government expected by Zoho? Was there any meeting or discussion before the ministers started promoting Zoho and Arattai? What's the backstory ?

Actually, it wasn’t planned. What happened is that we’ve been working with the government on our email software and office suite, a project that’s been ongoing for the last three to four years. The deployment of these services led to the attention you’ve seen, like the minister tweeting about the office suite. As a technocrat, he could naturally endorse the product, and that’s how the office suite gained visibility.

I would call this a natural progression of our ongoing work over the past few years in migrating emails to our cloud infrastructure. That tweet reflected this engagement. Beyond that, other factors also played a role,  notably, the growing need for data sovereignty in India and a push for India-based technology. I believe these considerations contributed significantly as well.

You mentioned strong engagement metrics. Can you share some numbers on usage and retention?

We’re seeing more than 100,000 meetings every day, growing 20–30% daily. Voice calls have crossed half a million and are rising rapidly. In just a week, we went from 3,000 to over 3–4 million sign-ups. Retention is improving too, though it’s still early to share exact numbers. Daily average users are also growing in a healthy way.

You’ve also said Arattai will integrate payments. Can you elaborate? Will it be UPI-based?

Yes, we’re exploring payment integration as part of our vision to make Arattai a super app that brings multiple services together. Payments are one part of that. It’s early, we’re working with third parties and hope to share updates by year-end.

What kept you going with Arattai between 2021 and now, despite limited attention back then?

We’ve always seen Arattai as foundational technology. Even before 2021, a small team had been building it for years. At Zoho, we invest in long-term, core tech, like email or our Office Suite, because it strengthens our ecosystem.

Even if adoption is slow, the learnings help us improve other products. So internally we keep using it and then we wait for it to develop and see to it that it is improving. So we are excited about using it. And so we kept investing on it.

We can never predict when these things will pick up or what will happen. But then we always believed that these foundational technologies should be present. And that's why from 2005 we have been investing in Office Suite.

We don’t judge these projects purely by ROI, but by relevance and value. We always believed that Arattai is something India needs, a homegrown messaging platform.

With WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram dominating, what’s Arattai’s right to win?

Every app stands on its own merit. For us, strong usage, calls, meetings, retention, is early validation. Our differentiation lies in features like integrated meetings, Android TV support, and contextual experiences tailored for Indian users.

We’ll keep innovating and let the product speak for itself. Our goal isn’t to predict success but to continually improve and delight users.

Will enterprise use cases also be a focus, like WhatsApp’s integrations for airlines or ticketing?

Absolutely. We’re working on a platform where businesses can integrate with Arattai. That’s part of our roadmap.

Tell us a little bit about the team behind Arattai.

The leadership team has been with Zoho for over 20 years. Jerry heads the product—he also led SalesIQ and Cliq. Srini leads the messaging framework, and Maria heads audio-video platforms.

The same backend technology powers our other apps, like Vani, our visual collaboration tool. This shared infrastructure ensures efficiency, continuity and consistency across products.

There’s talk of Arattai evolving into digital public infrastructure. Does that mean it’ll become interoperable?

Yes, that’s something we’re exploring. Today, messaging is closed, you can’t message a WhatsApp user from another app. With an open protocol, like email, multiple vendors could coexist. If there is a protocol, then there can be multiple vendors who has to differentiate themselves with the user experience and the end user functionality. Users would choose based on experience, not network size.

Interoperability would prevent monopolies and give users real choice. We’d welcome such standards.

Some users have raised concerns about surveillance on government-endorsed apps. What’s your response?

Every platform must comply with the laws of the country it operates in, that applies to us and all global apps. Our focus is on infrastructure scaling and performance, like improving contact sync and server capacity to handle the surge.

Basically, when the sign-up grows, so we need to actually add our infrastructure. So add more servers to handle this load. So that's one of the areas where we need to develop our effort in terms of freeing more servers and boosting it for Arattai.

We’ll comply with all legal requirements, just like any other vendor.

Zoho’s Office Suite, Mail, and now Arattai are gaining traction. Are there other consumer products in the works?

Our Office Suite has been around since 2005, and we recently launched Vani, our collaborative workspace. Most of our products are business-focused, but we experiment constantly. For consumers, Arattai is our first major app, others are still in R&D.

Do you expect this momentum to continue even if the government stops promoting Zoho?

Yes. There’s growing awareness about data sovereignty and interest in Indian-made software. Endorsements help, but long-term momentum depends on product value. If the app continues to deliver and differentiate, users will stay. That’s our focus.

When will end-to-end encryption be available for text chats?

Yes, so we are working on it and see already in the personal messaging, we have an option called personal chat or secret chat. So that means you could enable it and then say have the conversation. We are not yet making it default. The entire team is focusing on that. So soon, we will enable that for all the users.

How much have you had to invest since this sudden growth?

It is hard to give specific numbers. We’ve repurposed servers from our global data centers, especially for Arattai, and accelerated orders for new ones ahead of the November launch. We’ve also reassigned teams internally to prioritize Arattai. We are going to put a lot of people to focus on this wherever in whatever areas we need. Being a large organization helps, we can move people and resources quickly to address priorities.

What’s the mood like within Zoho after all this attention?

It's a very exciting time and we are very happy about that. At the same time, we are cautious about how we can improve the product in order to keep sustain this momentum. We don't want to lose our focus.  We also had an internal group where our own employees will be users as we wanted to bring in more and more issues on Arattai so that we keep improving it faster. We have that culture of allowing people anonymously to raise feedback on the products. So that's a culture we follow because Zoho runs on Zoho.

Every one of our employees are the users of the app. So we allow them to anonymously raise, criticize, design criticize the functionality and more. This way we also stay grounded. So while all the excitement is there, at one side we also look at all the challenges we face and then keep our focus on fixing them.

And the engineering team is really working hard. So I don't think they have enough time to process this excitement because they are continuously working on serving the demand. And we all want to support them now.

What role does AI play in Arattai? Will AI agents handle small tasks for users?

Yes, we have an Agents Studio. Some experiments are ongoing, including in Cliq, but nothing is concrete yet. Wherever it’s contextual, we want to bring AI features into the platform.

And on monetization, the team has said there won’t be ads. With your strong small business base, are there other monetization plans?

Not at the moment. Our focus is on scaling users and evolving the product. Zoho’s business side supports this, so we don’t need monetization in Arattai’s consumer space right now.

What’s next for Arattai? How will you keep user interest high?

Our immediate priority is improving performance and user experience. Updates are happening multiple times daily. We’re also actively working on opening the platform to third parties and businesses, which will be the next major focus.  So opening up to third parties and businesses will be the next big step.