Chennai/Bhubaneswar: Zoho Corporation is planning a new data centre in Odisha as it scales up its homegrown messaging app ‘Arattai’, Chief Scientist and Co-founder Sridhar Vembu said Tuesday.
Launched in 2021, Arattai is a privacy-first messaging app. Voice and video calls are end-to-end encrypted, and standard messages will be encrypted in future updates.
The move comes as the messaging platform sees significant growth in downloads and daily users across India.
Data from Sensor Tower shows downloads in India jumped 185 times week-over-week between September 21 and 27, while daily active users rose 40 times during the same period. The surge followed government endorsements that pushed the app to the top of India’s app charts. Since September 25, Arattai has been averaging around one lakh downloads per day, compared to just 300 earlier.
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Vembu clarified that all Zoho products, including Arattai, are built in India, with user data stored domestically across centres in Mumbai, Delhi, and Chennai, and a new facility planned in Odisha. Zoho does not rely on public cloud services like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, instead using its own hardware and open-source software.
The rapid growth has caused technical challenges, with daily sign-ups jumping from 3,000 to 3.5 lakh in just three days, prompting emergency infrastructure expansion. Vembu said the company is preparing for another potential 100x surge as new features and campaigns, originally scheduled for November, are rolled out earlier.
PNN & Agencies
