Meet Sridhar Vembu, CEO with Rs 25,000 crore who pays Rs 10,000 to his students

Normally, good schools charge a hefty fee from their students. However, in Tamil Nadu, a school pays its students a hefty stipend to learn. This school is being run by Sridhar Vembu, billionaire philanthropist who has shifted base to rural Tamil Nadu. Vembu's company Zoho Corporation made a profit of over Rs 2,700 crore in 2022-2023. The company is completely boot-strapped -- over 80 percent of the stake are with Vembu. At this level of success, entrepreneurs tend to gravitate towards luxury. However, the Padma Shri awardee chose the path of philanthropy and charity. Vembu is the 55th richest person in India.

Sridhar Vembu was born in 1968 in Tamil Nadu's Thanjavur. He completed his engineering from IIT Madras in 1989. He left for the United States after graduation. He did his post-graduation from New Jersey's Princeton University. He started his career with Qualcomm. In 1996, Vembu started a company with his brothers called Adventnet. It was a software firm. In the year 2009, this company was named Joho Corporation. In 2019, Vembu returned to India permanently. Instead of adopting a cosmopolitan lifestyle, he turned towards the rural area. He made his office in Tamil Nadu's Tenkasi district. The reason behind this was that he wanted to bring software development to villages. He wanted rural talent to get jobs in India's flagship import, IT services.

In the year 2020, Sridhar Vembu opened another startup in the field of rural education. He wanted to provide free primary education to children via his school. In 2005, he had opened the Zoho School, an ed-tech company that skills and upskills people. Most of those who work at Zoho are the students of this school. The Zoho School has trained people without any technical education to become software engineers.

Zoho School had started with just two teachers and six children. Today, it has over 800 students. 90 percent students of this school are from Tamil Nadu. The school is at Tenkasi. This school pays Rs 10000 as stipend to its students. Admission in this school is not based on marks or grades but on the ability of the individual.

Vembu's Zoho is the most profitable internet company in India. The biggest USP of the company is that it is profitable and bootstrapped. Last financial year, Zoho's operational revenue rose from Rs 5,230 crore to Rs 6,711 crore. Last financial year, the company earned Rs 1918 crore. It has over 12000 employees.

Vembu's net worth, according to Forbes, is over Rs 25,000 crore.

Vembu lives in the Mathalamparai village. He loves village life. He cycles around. In old interviews, he has talked about never raising capital to run the company. He said doesn't want to move away from the company by selling equity.

"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 website.