Zoho has launched an AI-powered academic learning management system, Zoho Classes 2.0, in a move that sidesteps the licensing-fee model dominant across the crowded edtech sector.
The Chennai-headquartered software major said that it will offer the platform at no product licensing cost to all Central and State government schools, colleges and universities in India, and to any individual teacher instructing up to 100 students.
The platform’s support for all 22 scheduled Indian languages gives Zoho an edge in reaching first-generation and regional-language learners, a segment largely underserved by English-first platforms. The company said that the launch would significantly reduce teacher workload through AI-driven course generation, grading, and reporting, while positioning the product for institution-wide adoption rather than single-classroom use.
“We have already logged around 500 sign-ups across a mix of government bodies, schools and universities. Roughly, a single state government contract can bring 50,000-60,000 students and hundreds of schools onto the platform at once,” Dev Anand Ramasamy, Vice President of Product Management Zoho told Fe, underscoring how a handful of government wins could quickly move usage numbers at scale.
Built on Zoho’s own infrastructure stack, Classes 2.0 offers data residency within India and compliance with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP) as data-sovereignty expectations have been tightened across sectors.
Ramaswamy added that the company has adopted a model-agnostic approach for the platform instead of relying on a single large language model. While Zoho’s in-house Zia LLM currently powers several business applications, the company is working to further optimise it for educational use cases before deploying it more widely in Classes 2.0. He added that Zoho has not faced any graphics processing unit (GPU) procurement constraints, having secured the necessary infrastructure through partnerships with hardware vendors.
Monetising Private Institutions
While the platform is free for government bodies and for individual teachers with up to 100 students, Zoho is monetising private institutions through a per-teacher licence rather than a per-student fee. Ramasamy said the product is priced at roughly ₹500 per teacher per month for private schools, colleges and universities, with no additional charge regardless of student volume. Additionally, there is a ‘pro’ tier subscription for institutions requiring custom workflows, such as approval-based lesson-plan submission cycles, which has a higher fee.
Zoho said that the platform supports key digital learning, multilingual education, and outcome-based learning objectives outlined under India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. Institutions can streamline reporting and documentation for accreditation frameworks including NAAC, NBA, UGC, and NMC.
While Zoho does not disclose segment-level financials publicly, the free-access strategy for government institutions signals a long-horizon bet on platform lock-in and future monetisation through premium administrative and compliance tools, rather than near-term licensing revenue.
By embedding itself in government-run institutions and individual classrooms at zero acquisition cost, Zoho seeks to position itself to upsell premium institutional features. That mirrors the freemium-to-enterprise playbook Zoho has already used successfully across its broader SaaS suite, which spans CRM, finance, and HR applications serving a global customer base.