Tree species Chennai-born messaging app Arattai — meaning ‘chat’ in Tamil — from Zoho has become the latest social media buzzword, recording a 100X surge in traffic in a few days.
Launched in 2021, Arattai isn’t new. But it went viral only this week after senior government ministers endorsed it and India’s startup and venture capital community quickly adopted it.
India’s track record with homegrown digital products is mixed, raising questions about whether Arattai can scale.
“Why (domestic) software products don’t pick up is because there’s a fascination for foreign consumer tech’’, said Siddarth Pai, founding partner at early-stage venture capital firm 3one4 Capital. “More than features, what’s going to be critical for Arattai is getting the network effect correct. For any messaging app, that depends on the number of people signing up as well as the engagement on the platform’’, he added.
3one4 Capital had backed Koo, India’s purported answer to Twitter (now X), which claimed 10 million monthly users before shutting down after struggling to raise funds.
“Mass adoption is mandatory for a messaging app, and will happen only in case of a disruption’’, said Anand Lunia, founding partner, India Quotient. “Until then, Arattai can focus on building tools, and if it has a decent base at the moment of disruption, it will grow 10, 20, 100X and achieve mass adoption’’.
Beyond messaging
Investors say Arattai’s survival depends on what it builds beyond chat.
The Zoho app could scale if it integrates with payments and commerce, Pai said. “It can grow by integrating with UPI and ONDC so that people can make payments and shop, and by layering other services to keep people on the app. It’s not a question of the superiority of technology, it’s just a question of adoption’’, he added.
Union ministers Ashwini Vaishnaw, Piyush Goyal, and Dharmendra Pradhan joining the app helped it gain traction, tying it to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s swadeshi push to use India-made products.
But analysts say the spike may be temporary, with many users likely to drift back to WhatsApp, which is deeply entrenched in India.
The sudden surge also exposed cracks — some users faced download glitches, OTP delays, and crashes. “As we add 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’’, Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu said in a post.
“The real opportunity isn’t in replicating WhatsApp for consumers,” said Brijesh Damodaran, managing partner at early-stage VC firm Auxano Capital. “It’s in reframing Arattai as a secure communication layer embedded in Zoho’s ecosystem. That’s not just messaging, it’s workflow integration, where stickiness comes from productivity, not virality’’.
Lessons from failures
India has seen multiple local challengers to global apps fail — whether in messaging or gaming. Fearless and United Guards, launched after PUBG’s ban, were shut down in 2024 after poor adoption and technical shortcomings.
“Some key factors here are increasing consumer adoption and models which provide commercial reasons for using these apps,” said Anand Ramanathan, partner and consumer industry leader, Deloitte India. “That is where the innovation has to happen, where value is provided on the B2B side while also offering a smooth interface on the B2C side,” Ramanathan added.
But he pointed to a crucial difference this time. “In the past, Indian brands didn’t get the user interface right and catered to a small user base. In this case, Arattai is competing in a broader market with more users, which could make it easier for it to gain some market share’’.