Sridhar Vembu says Zoho built its own cloud, now offering it free to students

Zoho co-founder Sridhar Vembu says the company built its own cloud infrastructure instead of relying on AWS or Google Cloud. Zoho is now opening the platform to developers through Catalyst and making it free for students.

In Short

• Zoho built its own cloud infrastructure in-house
• Catalyst is now available to developers outside Zoho
• Zoho plans to offer Catalyst free to students

Zoho co-founder Sridhar Vembu says the company chose to build its own cloud infrastructure instead of relying on services from major providers such as AWS and Google Cloud. Zoho is now making that infrastructure available to developers through Catalyst, its serverless platform, and plans to offer it free to students.

Vembu said Zoho started building its own infrastructure in the early days of the company to run its applications. This includes several of the basic systems needed to operate cloud software, including databases, identity, messaging, search, storage and computing.

“One of the early things we did at Zoho was build our own cloud infrastructure to run our applications,” Vembu said in a recent post.

He said Zoho built these systems itself rather than depending on AWS or Google Cloud. The company has since opened this infrastructure to developers through Catalyst. Catalyst was originally created as a way for developers to extend Zoho applications. According to Vembu, the platform is now also being used by developers who are not part of the Zoho ecosystem.

Zoho wants students to build without infrastructure costs

Zoho is putting more investment into Catalyst and will make the platform free for students. The company wants students to be able to build and deploy applications without having to worry about infrastructure costs while they work on their projects.

“Our goal is to give developers the infrastructure to turn their ideas into real products,” Vembu said.

The move also fits with Vembu's earlier comments about how Zoho builds and runs its products. In a September 2025 post, he addressed questions about where the company's software is developed, where customer data is stored and which companies provide the infrastructure behind Zoho's services.

Vembu said all Zoho products are developed in India and that the company's global headquarters is in Chennai. Zoho has offices in more than 80 countries, including a large presence in the US.

He also said Indian customer data is hosted in India, with data centres in Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai at the time of his post, with another planned in Odisha. Zoho has more than 18 data centres around the world, with the company saying it hosts data according to the relevant country or region.

“All our services run on hardware we own and software frameworks we developed, on top of open source like Linux OS and Postgres database,” Vembu said.

He also said Zoho does not host its products on AWS or Azure. Some services from large cloud companies may be used for regional switching nodes, which can help improve traffic speeds, but Vembu said the data is not stored on those services. Zoho is also adding more points of presence in different locations.

Vembu warns developers not to lose control to AI

Vembu has recently spoken about another issue facing software developers: the growing use of AI tools to write code.

Responding to a developer who described a workplace where specifications, code, tests and other engineering work were being produced using Claude Code, Vembu said companies should not let AI replace engineers' understanding of their own software.

“This is sad. I tell our engineers to use AI but never cede our understanding to AI,” he said.

Vembu said the software industry is moving too quickly with AI and compared it to “driving too fast in a fancy new car we barely understand how to drive." He warned that this could create problems if developers stop understanding the systems they are building.

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