Zoho Corp founder and Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu on September 30 said that all Indian customer data is stored within the country, amid a sharp surge in downloads of the company’s homegrown messaging app Arattai.
“Indian customer data is hosted in India (Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai, soon Odisha). We have over 18 data centers globally and they host the respective country or regional data. We are committed to hosting each country data in their own jurisdiction,” Vembu wrote on X.
His comments come as Arattai climbed to the top of Apple’s App Store and is nearing the top 100 on Google Play, after previously ranking outside the top 500, reflecting renewed consumer interest.
Arattai, a WhatsApp rival launched by Indian software giant Zoho in 2021, is witnessing renewed interest among consumers in the country.
Over the past week, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan endorsed Arattai on social media, while IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has promoted Zoho's range of productivity products.
On September 22, Vaishnaw announced on X (formerly Twitter) that he would switch to Zoho’s tools for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and he recently conducted a cabinet briefing using Zoho Show.
The clarification also comes amid rising questions about where Zoho develops its products and hosts its customer data.
“All the products are developed in India. Our global headquarters is in Chennai and we pay taxes in India on our global income,” Vembu said, countering what he called “a lot of false information we want to correct.”
Vembu also stressed that Zoho does not rely on hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, or GCP for hosting its services. “All our services run on hardware we own and software frameworks we developed, on top of open source like Linux OS and Postgres database. Arattai, specifically, is not hosted on AWS or Azure or GCloud,” he explained.
“We are proudly ‘Made in India, Made for the World’ and we mean it,” Vembu wrote.
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