Sridhar Vembu, founder and CEO of Saas giant Zoho Corporation, announced that the company will invest in Yali Aerospace. The drone startup based out of Thanjavur, in Tamil Nadu, has built a fixed wing drone with vertical take off and landing capabilities.
With a range of 150 km, payload of 7kg, and a maximum speed of 155 km/hr, the drone can help in delivering medicines and organs to remote hospitals, thereby bypassing the problems of emergency road transport.
Source: X
Yali Aerospace, is led by a husband-wife duo Dinesh Baluraj and Anugraha who returned from the Netherlands to build the startup in their hometown. Baluraj comes from an Aerospace engineering background having done his masters from Technical University of Munich.
Zoho’s Rural Push
Vembu has always been a strong voice for pushing rural and local growth and has been continuously working towards growing tier 2 and 3 cities. Zoho has opened up over 25 satellite offices in these tier cities.
Recently, the company has also opened up R&D centres in Tenkasi (Tamil Nadu) and Kottarakara (Kerala) to retain local talent and encourage people to move closer to their hometowns. The 3500 sq. ft. park in Kottarakara is said to train over 5000 people over the next five years.
“I have to look at how to positively create jobs, moving skills and capabilities, and ensuring that we retain our talent, because there is a lot of pressure in rural areas for talent to migrate away,” said Vembu in an earlier interview.
Zoho, is the first bootstrapped company in the world to cross 100 million users and the company serves over 700K businesses across 150 countries.
