Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology firm, has announced that it is serving 100 million users across its 55-plus business applications, the first bootstrapped SaaS company to reach this milestone without any external funding. 

 

This growth comes on the heels of the company reaching $1 billion in annual revenue last year. Zoho now has more than 700,000 customers across 150-plus countries. The company has steadily increased its traction from one million users in 2008 to 100 million—with the last 50 million users added within the past five years. The Middle East and North Africa (Mena) is one of Zoho's fastest-growing regions with UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt being top markets.

 

“I want to thank all of our customers for trusting us with their business and helping us reach 100 million users worldwide," said Sridhar Vembu, Co-founder and CEO of Zoho Corp. "This is an impressive milestone for any organisation, but it's particularly sweet for us as a bootstrapped company that has never raised external capital. And we are not done yet. We have an impressive innovation pipeline covering the next 10 years, investing in deep technologies to serve billions of users around the world. We're working towards it, and we want to thank all of you for your continued support." 

 

Transnational localism

Zoho's growth has been driven by an unwavering commitment to its 'transnational localism' strategy over the years, where it remained anchored to its roots all whilst continuing to evolve and tailor its offerings to meet local market needs across the world. In the Mena region, Zoho has achieved this through product localisation, opening new offices, hiring local talent, and partnering with leading public and private entities to support governments' digitalisation agendas.

 

The company has continued to diversify and innovate its product portfolio to meet the changing market and customer demands. This year, Zoho launched a free privacy-centered browser, Ulaa, which enables a secure browsing experience for individuals and organisations. It has also unveiled new features and capabilities in 13 apps powered by generative AI and ChatGPT that further improve businesses' productivity and efficiency. 

 

Nine products

Over the past years, Zoho launched nine products with an Arabic User Interface (UI) which included top-selling products such as Zoho Books (VAT-compliant accounting software) and Zoho CRM (customer relationship management software) as well as other leading apps such as Zoho SalesIQ (live chat and website tracking app), Zoho Inventory (inventory management software), Zoho People (HRMS platform), Zoho Bigin (pipeline-centric CRM for small businesses), Zoho Desk (helpdesk software) and Zoho Creator (low-code platform). In addition, the company's commerce platform Zoho Commerce is one of the few applications to support Right-to-Left (RTL) as well as offer retailers both international and regional payment gateway options. 

 

Zoho maintains an uncompromising, privacy-centered approach where it respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. The company owns and operates its data centres, ensuring complete monitoring of customer data, privacy, and security. More than 100 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho every day to run their businesses, including Zoho itself.-- TradeArabia News Service