CHENNAI: If you haven’t heard of Radha Vembu, don’t fret. You have entered the illustrious league of Addison Booth, a Zoho consultant from England. “Why have I never heard of Radha Vembu before today (and her amazing achievements)?” he bemused himself in a recent comment on LinkedIn, quoting an article link on her.
Hidden in the obscurity of the conventional Chennai, Radha Vembu finds a hallowed niche in the neighbourhood. It is strange how the senior executive of the billion-dollar Zoho Corporation her brother Sridhar Vembu, along with a couple of others, founded stays away from the media glare. She has amassed $2.5 billion in her kitty, as per Forbes real-time data. The appetite for information about the 50-year-old, sari-clad and sporting salt-and-pepper hair, spiked after she was named the third richest self-made women in India by Hurun in 2022, along with Roshni Nadar Malhotra and Kiran Mazumdar Shaw.
She’s described as calm and task-oriented. But none of her colleagues wants to talk about her, fearing that it would mean trespassing into her private life. TNIE reached out to a few senior Zoho executives who gently declined to comment on her.
How Liz Miller, vice president of the US-based Constellation Research Inc, last week described Vembu at the Truly Zoho event, sums up her role. “Part of the Zoho, (the) difference is that among all the tools and platforms, there is a common framework. And if anyone questions who the physical manifestation of that connective framework is...her name is Radha Vembu. The framework to Sridhar Vembu’s big dream.”
Not long ago, Radha Vembu was also featured in the 2020 Kotak-Hurun list of richest women in India. Her philosophy is to stay invisible and let work do the talking, according to a rare interview to Forbes in 2019. Ranked the 1,173rd billionaire in the world, her wealth comes from her stakes in Zoho. She is the product manager of Zoho Mail and Zoho Workplace and helped the bootstrapped startup reach its peaks. Zoho Mail was started in 2008 and has over 15 million users.
Hailing from Thanjavur and having graduated from Indian Institute of Technology (Madras) in industrial management in 1997, she is a pillar of strength at Zoho. Currently, she resides in Chennai with her family. Her husband Rajendran Dandapani is on the Zoho board. He is Business Solutions Evangelist at Zoho Corporation and President at Zoho Schools of Learning. On some rare occasions, Dandapani has tweeted about Radha gifting him books and cooking for him. The couple has a son.
She is reportedly looking after the philanthropic activities of Zoho. She also sits on the board of Go Frugal, a startup run by her other brother Kumar Vembu. “I’m constantly thinking about how to improve one of the most technically challenging products in the company. We like delighting and surprising our customers with contextual integration,” she was quoted as saying recently by Kuppulakshmi Krishnamoorthy, global head -- Zoho for Startups.
While Sridhar Vembu has been running his global company from Tenkasi in rural Tamil Nadu for several years, Radha Vembu shuttles between Chennai and Tenkasi apart from its offices across India and abroad. Zoho’s work culture is quite popular. It is one of the three unicorns born out of TN in the last decade. While the other two tech companies moved their headquarters abroad, Zoho has moved inward and set up campuses in smaller towns.
In November 2022, it surpassed $1 billion in annual revenues, and remains a privately-funded company. Sridhar Vembu said the company’s success owes to long-term investment in product research and development and focussed more in R&D then in marketing. Best known for the online office suite offering Zoho Office Suite, the firm competes with the likes of Microsoft and Salesforce.
In a country where gender divide of tech giants is high, Radha Vembu is indeed an inspiration. India needs more women in tech to motivate young girls to overcome bias and stereotypes, and she is leading the way, albeit quietly.