“We don't need to compete with ChatGPT”: Zoho CEO Mani Vembu says company is focusing on vertical SaaS

Zoho, the Indian tech giant, is doubling down on vertical SaaS. CEO Mani Vembu said the company identifies the domain as a "major growth area similar to where horizontal SaaS was two decades ago".

Under Vembu's leadership, the tech company is focusing on differentiating itself from competitors by developing in-house AI solutions to cater to unique business needs, instead of competing with general-purpose models.

Zoho plans to focus on vertical SaaS

The tech MNC is stepping into the vertical SaaS market to provide customised solutions for specific industries.

Speaking to Moneycontrol in an interaction, Mani Vembu disclosed Zoho's plans to move from horizontal SaaS to specific industries, such as auto dealership management (Auto DMS) and BFSI, to radically reduce implementation timelines from 18 months to six. 

Currently, Zoho is productising its early wins in these verticals for scale and expansion.

“Many vertical SaaS players don’t even publish their pricing, which shows the market is ripe for disruption,” Vembu said.

The company’s newly launched Zia LLM, an in-house large language model built from scratch, trained on 7 billion parameters, is at the core of this approach.

Also read: YC-backed Indian AI startup CodeParrot shuts down, “Startups are brutally hard,” says cofounder (startuppedia.in)

Zoho's AI goals

The company has also launched Zia Agents, which are task-specific AI agents to automate routine tasks such as drafting emails, creating reports, summarising support tickets, and scheduling meetings, while allowing human oversight.

“In our stack, we control everything from the data layer to the model to the user interface. That’s what allows us to go deep,” said Ramamoorthy, Director of AI Research at Zoho.

“We don't need to compete with ChatGPT,” said Vembu. “That’s not our goal. Our goal is to solve for specific business needs—and we believe we are in a strong position to do that.”

Mani Vembu took over after his elder brother, Sreedhar, stepped down to become “chief scientist” of the Zoho group in January this year.

Zoho is the country's biggest privately held tech services provider, competing for revenue with peers LTIMindtree, Mphasis, Coforge, Persistent Services and others.

Also read: President Murmu inaugurates MSME Idea Hackathon 5.0 at IIT Indore to support early-stage startups (startuppedia.in)