Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu Steps Down From CEO Role To Focus On R&D

Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu Steps Down From CEO Role To Focus On R&D

SUMMARY

Sridhar Vembu said that he will be taking up the role of Chief Scientist and will be responsible for deep R&D initiatives at the company

Vembu said that in the view of the various challenges and opportunities, including recent major developments in AI, it was decided that he should focus on R&D

Zoho's cofounder and vice president of ManageEngine Shailesh Davey will take up the role of group CEO

After about three decades of scaling enterprise tech giant Zoho as its CEO, Sridhar Vembu has stepped down from his role as group CEO. 

In a post on X, Vembu said that he will be taking up the role of Chief Scientist and will be responsible for deep R&D initiatives at the company. 

“In view of the various challenges and opportunities facing us, including recent major developments in AI, it has been decided that it is best that I should focus full time on R&D initiatives, along with pursuing my personal rural development mission,” his post read.

Zoho’s cofounder and vice president of the company’s IT management division ManageEngine, Shailesh Davey, will take up the role of group CEO. The other cofounder, Tony Thomas, will lead the Zoho US division, while Rajesh Ganesan will lead ManageEngine. Zoho’s COO and Vembu’s brother Mani Vembu will lead the Zoho.com division, he added.

Sridhar Vembu’s bid to “get back to hands-on technical work” with a focus on AI comes at a time when GenAI is disrupting industries across the globe. This poses challenges as well as opportunities for companies, and most of them currently seem to be finetuning their AI playbook.

According to Inc42’s “The Pulse of Tech” survey, about 33% of the 100+ surveyed founders of seed, growth and late stages startups are keen on using a hybrid approach to build their AI tech stack. Meanwhile, only 16% are relying solely on building custom GenAI solutions in-house. 

In the case of Zoho, Sridhar Vembu had shared ambitious plans to build the SaaS giant’s AI capabilities. Speaking with Inc42 in September, he highlighted that the company was focussing on developing smaller, context-specific models — like an AI writing assistant for document creation, tools for summarisation, customer churn prediction in CRM, or anomaly detection in IoT.  

Besides, he had also underlined Zoho’s bid to build large language models (LLMs). The company was then conducting R&D and also collaborating with major AI providers, integrating their APIs into Zoho’s systems.

“We are exploring AI’s potential to detect threats early on, which ties into the concept of zero trust — a security model where no one, not even employees, is trusted by default. It’s an added layer of security, and we are investing in that,” he had said then. 

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Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu Steps Down From CEO Role To Focus On R&D-Inc42 Media
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