The Padma Shri awardee Sridhar Vembu is an Indian billionaire businessman. He is the founder and CEO of Zoho Corporation and has a net worth of $3.8 billion. He was at the 48th position in the Forbes ‘India’s 100 Richest 2022’ list. Sridhar Vembu’s Zoho School which provides a Rs 10,000 stipend to its students to learn was started with just two teachers and six children. At present, the school has over 800 students. As per reports, the company made a profit of over Rs 2,700 crore in 2022-2023.
Sridhar Vembu’s net worth
Sridhar Vembu’s net worth is $3.75 billion. He runs the in-house Zoho University, which provides training to students who have completed 12th grade and have certain math and tech skills. Zoho invested $2.5 million in start-up Genrobotics in May 2022 – It is working on solutions to eliminate manual scavenging. In 2022-2023, Zoho Corporation made a profit of over Rs 2,700 crore.
Sridhar Vembu’s early life
Sridhar Vembu was Born in 1968 in Tamil Nadu’s Thanjavur – His father worked as a stenographer in Chennai’s High Court, and his mother was a homemaker.
Sridhar Vembu’s education
He received his primary education in a government-sponsored school with a Tamil-language curriculum. Sridhar Vembu completed his engineering from IIT Madras in 1989 and left for the United States after graduation.
Sridhar Vembu’s career
In 1994, he started his career at Qualcomm. Sridhar Vembu, in 1996, started a company with his brothers called Adventnet. The software firm was later named Zoho Corporation. In 2019, he decided to come back to India permanently and opened his office in Tamil Nadu’s Tenkasi district. He concentrated on rural areas as he wanted to bring software development to villages.
In 2004, Sridhar Vembu decided to set up Zoho Schools to provide vocational software development education to rural students as an alternative to formal university education.
A statement from the company states that 15 to 20 percent of its engineers have no college degree, but have received vocational education from Zoho Schools. In 2020, he announced a “rural school startup” focused on free primary education.
Sridhar Vembu’s Zoho School pays Rs 10,000 stipend to students
“What we teach is much more relevant for real software careers. At Zoho, we look for skill sets and abilities more than for paper credentials. We do not charge our students any fees. Instead, we pay a stipend – starting at Rs 10,000 /month – throughout the course of study. After the successful completion of the course, you are automatically inducted as an employee into Zoho Corporation, a world leader in cloud-based software products,” the company said on its official website.