Zoho becomes the first bootstrapped SaaS company to reach 100 million users

Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, today announced that it is serving 100 million users across its 55+ business applications. Zoho is the first bootstrapped SaaS company to reach this milestone and has done so without any external funding.

This growth comes on the heels of the company reaching 1 billion USD in annual revenue last year. Zoho now has more than 700,000 customers across 150+ countries. The company has steadily increased its traction from one million users in 2008 to 100 million—with the last 50 million users added within the past five years. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is one of Zoho’s fastest-growing regions with UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt being top markets.

“I want to thank all of our customers for trusting us with their business and helping us reach 100 million users worldwide,” said Sridhar Vembu, Co-founder and CEO of Zoho Corp. “This is an impressive milestone for any organization, but it’s particularly sweet for us as a bootstrapped company that has never raised external capital. And we are not done yet. We have an impressive innovation pipeline covering the next 10 years, investing in deep technologies to serve billions of users around the world. We’re working towards it, and we want to thank all of you for your continued support.”

In the UAE, the company revealed earlier this year that it had grown 10 times in the country over the last five years, with a 5-year CAGR of 60%, and announced plans for investing AED 100 million into expansion in the UAE.

Zoho’s growth has been driven by an unwavering commitment to its ‘transnational localism’ strategy over the years, where it remained anchored to its roots all whilst continuing to evolve and tailor its offerings to meet local market needs across the world. In the MENA region, Zoho has achieved this through product localization, opening new offices, hiring local talent, and partnering with leading public and private entities to support governments’ digitalization agendas.

In recent years, Zoho has partnered with various organizations such as the Department of Economy and Tourism (DET) and Dubai Culture in order to make enterprise technology available to businesses of all sizes. It has also partnered with educational institutes like the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) and Emirates Academy of Hospitality Management (EAHM) to offer upskilling courses. Since 2020, Zoho has helped over 3,500 SMEs gain access to its cloud technology through various partnerships, investing AED 20 million in wallet credits. It also invested AED 4.5 million in upskilling initiatives for imparting digital literacy to over 200+ students and 300+ companies.

The company has continued to diversify and innovate its product portfolio to meet the changing market and customer demands. This year, Zoho launched a free privacy-centered browser, Ulaa, which enables a secure browsing experience for individuals and organizations. It has also unveiled new features and capabilities in 13 apps powered by generative AI and ChatGPT that further improve businesses’ productivity and efficiency.

Over the past years, Zoho launched nine products with an Arabic User Interface (UI) which included top-selling products such as Zoho Books (VAT-compliant accounting software) and Zoho CRM (customer relationship management software) as well as other leading apps such as Zoho SalesIQ (live chat and website tracking app), Zoho Inventory (inventory management software), Zoho People (HRMS platform), Zoho Bigin (pipeline-centric CRM for small businesses), Zoho Desk (helpdesk software) and Zoho Creator (low-code platform). In addition, the company’s commerce platform Zoho Commerce is one of the few applications to support Right-to-Left (RTL) as well as offer retailers both international and regional payment gateway options.

Zoho maintains an uncompromising, privacy-centered approach where it respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. The company owns and operates its data centers, ensuring complete oversight of customer data, privacy, and security. More than 100 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho every day to run their businesses, including Zoho itself.