Arattai, Zoho’s indigenous messaging app, has seen a 100x increase in signups in 2 days, according to company Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu. In a post on X, Vembu said that sign ups went from 3,000/day to 350,000/day and that the company is adding infrastructure on an emergency basis for another potential 100x peak surge.
We have faced a 100x increase in Arattai traffic in 3 days (new sign-ups went vertical from 3K/day to 350K/day). We are adding infrastructure on an emergency basis for another potential 100x peak surge. That is how exponentials work.
As we add a lot more infrastructure, we are…
— Sridhar Vembu (@svembu) September 28, 2025
Launched in 2021 as a Made-in-India alternative to WhatsApp, Arattai has come into the limelight recently after the Minister of Education, Dharmendra Pradhan had urged people to support India-made digital platforms posting about how he was moving to the messaging app for his communication needs.
“As we add a lot more infrastructure, we are also fine tuning and updating the code to fix issues as they arise. We have all-hands-on-deck working flat out,” Vembu said in his post. He added that the company had planned on a big release by November, with a huge capacity addition and a marketing push before the recent surge in user volume.
Earlier, Vembu had mentioned that he wanted Arattai to offer the best messaging experience in the world, including on low end phones with network bandwidth as low as 8 kilobits/second.
“We built Arattai because we felt we needed that kind of engineering capability in Bharat. We need a lot more of such capabilities and Zoho has some very ambitious, long-range R&D projects in the pipeline including compilers, databases, OS, security, hardware, chip design and robotics among others. We have a policy of ignoring short term profits, as long as we don’t lose money,” he added.
Piyush Goyal, Minister for Commerce and Industry, Goverment of India, has joined a slew of Union Ministers who have expresses support for Arattai.
“Nothing beats the feeling of using a Swadeshi product. So proud to be on Arattai, a MadeInIndia messaging platform that brings India closer,” Goyal said in a post on X.
Meanwhile, Union Minister for Information Technology also met the Zoho team and discussed plans of scaling up infrastructure to support Arattai’s growth.
Published on September 29, 2025
