Arattai is making headlines for reaching the number 1 position on App stores for the social networking category. Arattai is the instant messaging developed by Zoho software company, and it’s completely Made in India. Although the App launched silently in 2021, it has recently been making headlines after achieving number 1 rank on the App stores.
Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho, has presented Arattai as a safer, spyware-free alternative to global messaging platforms. Its positioning as a “made-in-India, privacy-first” service seems to have struck the right chord with people. This is bad news for WhatsApp, since India is the largest market for it. Moreover, there is an anti-US sentiment against American companies amongst people currently. This is due to US-imposed tariffs on India.
Unreal success of Arattai!
The success of Arattai has garnered praise from industry leaders like Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity. Meanwhile Zoho’s founder, Sridhar Vembu, shared that the response has been far bigger than what the team ever anticipated. He revealed that Arattai sign-ups jumped from 3,000 a day to 3.5 lakh a day in just three days.
“We faced a 100x increase in Arattai traffic in three days We are scrambling to add infrastructure for another possible 100x surge. That is how exponentials work,” Vembu wrote on X. He also admitted that engineers are working around the clock to fix issues and get the app ready for a bigger rollout in November.
Sridhar Vembu spills reason behind Arattai’s success!
Commenting on the success of Arattai, Sridhar Vembu said, “the instant messaging app would very likely not have been built by a public company that faces quarter-to-quarter financial pressure,” he said. Calling the app a “hopelessly foolish” project that even employees doubted, he added that Zoho built it because it believed India needed such engineering strength. “This kind of long-range R&D simply cannot survive quarter-to-quarter market pressures,” Vembu noted.
He also shed light on Zoho’s working culture, which he described as deeply frugal, especially among its founders and senior leaders. Vembu compared it to the way ISRO scientists operate, focused on the bigger picture, without chasing short-term rewards. “We essentially ignore short-term profits, as long as we don’t lose money,” he wrote, pointing out that this mindset is difficult to explain to “Wall Street or Dalal Street.”
Vembu went a step further to say Zoho is not just a software company but more like a research lab that funds itself. He listed projects across fields like chip design, compilers, operating systems, robotics, AI, and even security. Many of these, he admitted, are not expected to bring in quick returns but are vital for long-term capability building.
Meanwhile, for users, Arattai offers the usual mix of features, messaging, calls, voice notes, media sharing, and even support for Android TV. Its strongest appeal lies in its privacy stance. The company has assured that there will be no monetisation of user data and has already rolled out end-to-end encryption for calls. Encryption for chats, however, is still being developed.
