[Exclusive] Zoho Finally Brings Vibe Coding Into India’s Sovereign AI Push

Lovable and Replit from the West and Rocket and Emergent from India have shown that vibe coding works, even in production. But Zoho thinks it is still not production-ready. Maybe the team must have tried it themselves. The next bottleneck in software development, Zoho believes, is hiding behind all the code.

The Chennai-based company has launched Catalyst 3.0, the latest version of its full-stack cloud development platform, with a pitch that puts it squarely in the increasingly crowded AI-native development market.

The proposition is to take the developer from the first prompt to a production-ready application without forcing them to jump between a collection of cloud services.

“Writing the code itself became lightning quick, but after the code is written, to take it live to an app which is on a production level, and then to maintain it at runtime levels, that became a bottleneck,” Anand Nergunam, Global Vice President, Revenue Growth at Zoho, tells AIM.

The bottleneck, in other words, has moved. It is about the speed of writing code and the ability to take that code live. That is the central idea behind Catalyst 3.0.

While companies such as Vercel, Supabase and AWS have become closely associated with the modern developer stack, Zoho is asking developers to not juggle between the best tools for each layer and it wants to provide the entire stack in one place.

And now, it wants AI agents to operate it.

The Vibe Coding Problem

Zoho cites data showing that more than 72% of developers use AI every day to write code. Nergunam puts the current adoption of coding assistants somewhere between 70% and 90%.

The consequence is that code generation is no longer necessarily the slowest part of building an application. “The big part of writing the code is kind of getting taken over by the agents, and so that has significantly enhanced the productivity,” Nergunam says.

Catalyst 3.0, therefore, isn’t really Zoho’s answer to AI coding assistants. It is Zoho’s attempt to become the infrastructure underneath them. 

Nergunam describes competitors like AWS Amplify, Supabase and Vercel as specialists that have become exceptionally good at individual parts of application development.

But, from Zoho’s perspective, that specialisation creates another problem for the developer. “I have to subscribe, manage, wire, and then authenticate. All of this needs to happen, and that’s the friction that I’m talking about.”

Catalyst wants to make developers think less about the infrastructure altogether. The platform provides frontend hosting, serverless functions, compute and data management, while applications built on it inherit Zoho’s cloud security infrastructure. Developers can also host applications in Zoho’s India data centres. 

Instead of charging a subscription on top of usage, Catalyst uses a pay-as-you-go model. Users can see their consumption and set budget alerts and ceilings. It offers a monthly free-tier model for developers to explore the platform. Users are also offered ₹15,000 equivalent free credits so they can experience the platform beyond the free tier for a six-month period.

Zoho ultimately aims for fewer vendors, fewer bills and fewer things to manage.

The Agentification of Vibe Coding

The bigger shift in Catalyst 3.0, however, is not serverless infrastructure. It is the attempt to make the infrastructure itself accessible to AI agents. Zoho has introduced Agent Skills that allow AI coding assistants to understand Catalyst and generate production-grade code for the platform.

The company has also added MCP support and a non-interactive CLI, allowing developers to carry out tasks from within their coding assistant rather than repeatedly switching to a cloud console. How this competes with the likes of Claude Code and Cursor remains to be seen.

The constant roadblock faced by the country’s sovereign stack push is the adoption. For example, Zoho’s Arattai still has to see increased adoption after the initial push from the government. The same goes for Zoho Mail, which is currently working in government offices, but has seen no major push apart from that.

The company also recently launched its own Nathu La server to host all of Zoho’s internal work on internal servers, pitching it as “Zoho runs on Zoho” and eventually looking to scale it beyond others. Catalyst adoption in India still needs to stand the test of time. 

“If you want to sell it commercially, you want to produce customers, you want to have the data. The transparency angle is missing,” Nergunam says about other tools. Catalyst is designed to make that process more visible by allowing developers to see which tool it is using.

Open Source is the Key

Zoho is also open-sourcing its AI skills, SDK, CLI and Slyte JavaScript framework. The AI skills are available through the Claude Code and Codex marketplaces as well.

Zoho sees an opportunity that goes beyond the traditional software industry. There are thousands of highly specific problems in healthcare, manufacturing, legal services, logistics and government that may never have justified a dedicated software team.

As an example, one steel manufacturer built a loyalty platform in which distributors could scan invoices, automatically identify the manufacturer’s products and receive loyalty points.

Eternia by Hindalco used the platform to bring information from multiple Zoho applications into a single experience. 

We the Leaders foundation, which has nearly two million leaders, built its digital engagement platform on Catalyst, using its authentication, datastore, serverless functions, file storage and scheduled jobs; the application went through security audits and was built across Android, iOS and the web in three weeks. 

System integrators are also using Catalyst to build their own products. Element Technology Services built ConfigPilot and ActionPilot on the platform, while Wanas Apps built its real-estate product Nibni on Catalyst, using MCP to allow its AI agents to work directly with the platform. 

As Gavin Smith, Director, Element Technology Services, put it, “Catalyst’s agent-ready approach, where an AI agent can write, deploy, and manage the underlying services just as readily as one of our engineers can, helped us get to first release faster.” Mostafa Wanas, Founder and Managing Director, Wanas Apps, similarly said, “Working with Catalyst meant our time went into the product our customers actually pay for, not the plumbing underneath it.”

Instead of every startup trying to build the next frontier model, developers could build the software sitting downstream from those models.

That is also why the company is making Catalyst 3.0 available through a free student programme. Zoho wants students to experiment without worrying about cloud bills or whether they know enough DevOps to deploy what they build.

The Full Stack Full Competition

Zoho’s definition of full stack is unusually broad. It extends from the applications customers use all the way down to bare-metal infrastructure and, eventually, chips. The reason is equally broad: security, privacy and cost.

“Once it is deeply integrated, it gives us the security, the privacy, which is something that we are super careful about and conscious about, and then also the cost advantage.” That vertical integration also explains another decision inside Catalyst.

This might also look the company is positioning itself against the likes of Sarvam, Gnani, and others that are trying to build the sovereign AI stack for the country. Zoho has clearly chosen to stand in the field amongst giants like AWS, Lovable and Google from the West. But with the approach of Catalyst 3.0, the company will provide the underlying server-less canvas for these ecosystems, and not compete with them.

If it all turns out well, Zoho might be the unique company building the actual sovereign stack for the country, only if the adoption increases as needed for it to happen.