Zoho’s Made-in-India messaging app Arattai is having a breakout weekend. On October 4, Mahindra Group chairman Anand Mahindra said he downloaded the app “with pride,” a public pat on the back that set off a wave of goodwill for the swadeshi challenger to WhatsApp.
Zoho co-founder and Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu responded that the shout-out gave the team “even more determination,” noting he was in a meeting with Arattai engineers at Zoho’s Tenkasi office when a colleague showed him the tweet.
What’s new: Vembu opens the hood
Early on October 5, Vembu publicly sketched the technical scaffolding behind Arattai, framing a seemingly simple app “built on a vast amount of deep engineering” and decades of in-house R&D .
- Real-time comms stack: Arattai’s calling and meetings ride on Zoho’s homegrown messaging/AV framework, refined over 15 years to deliver “crisp calls and meetings that connect quickly.”
- Distributed computing bedrock: A framework perfected over two decades balances workloads across servers and databases, with fault tolerance, monitoring and security, the same backbone protecting Zoho’s wider cloud ecosystem .
Vembu also underlined Zoho’s culture of patient research: “Our staying power comes from the depth of all the R&D we do,” adding that he has moved full-time into R&D and urging his team to keep the discipline of a “Rishi” regardless of praise or criticism .
Product snapshot: privacy-first, no ads, no forced AI
Arattai’s recent pitch is straightforward: meetings and calls, Pocket storage, @mentions—and a stance of no ads and no forced AI, with privacy and simplicity as the through-line.
The app launched in 2021 and has climbed India’s app charts this week, drawing direct comparisons with WhatsApp (which is embedded in the daily life of more than 500 million users in India) . The name itself signals intent: Arattai means “chat” in Tamil, and it’s built entirely on Zoho’s indigenous tech stack .
The surge: sign-ups spike, business leaders chime in
The momentum isn’t just anecdotal. By the end of September, daily sign-ups jumped from 3,000 to 350,000 within three days, according to industry chatter highlighted alongside congratulatory notes from Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas . Edelweiss MF chief Radhika Gupta added that she’s an Arattai user and a “big believer in Made in India brands,” hoping to see world-class Indian products scale over the next two decades.
Mahindra’s endorsement helped crystallize the mood on social platforms, where many celebrated the sight of one entrepreneur openly backing another .
Trust and Execution
As attention swells, some users have also used the spotlight to question the lack of end-to-end encrypted chats, an issue being raised in community discussions this week. That feedback is attributed to users’ posts and is not an official Zoho statement . Sustaining momentum will depend on the engineering claims translating into reliably great calls, smooth group coordination and a steady cadence of improvements, areas Vembu says are squarely in focus for the team .
If Arattai can pair its “deep engineering” foundations with a transparent, privacy-first product and crisp performance at scale, it strengthens the case for a homegrown, interoperable Indian chat ecosystem built on indigenous tech.
The public support from industry leaders gives the app cultural air cover; the next test is long-haul execution in a market where WhatsApp remains the default for everything from family groups to small-business commerce.
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