Global technology company Zoho has reinforced its commitment to Kenya with a dual announcement at Zoholics Kenya 2025 in Nairobi — unveiling a suite of in-house AI technologies while revealing strong local business performance, including 39% year-on-year revenue growth in 2024.
Over the past three years, Zoho has posted a 25% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in Kenya, driven by rising demand for unified, scalable business solutions. In 2024, the company grew its local partner network by 83% and expanded its Kenyan workforce by 72%, underlining the country’s importance as a strategic market in Africa. Popular solutions among Kenyan businesses include Zoho One (the all-in-one operating system for business), Workplace, CRM Plus, CRM, Books, and Zoho Desk. Uptake has been strong across sectors such as IT services, financial services, insurance, energy, manufacturing, telecommunications, retail, real estate, and construction.
Alongside these growth milestones, Zoho showcased a major leap in AI capabilities with the launch of Zia LLM, its proprietary large language model, developed entirely in-house using NVIDIA’s AI-accelerated computing platform. Purpose-built for enterprise use, Zia LLM supports functions such as structured data extraction, summarisation, retrieval-augmented generation, and code generation. Three model sizes — 1.3B, 2.6B, and 7B parameters — ensure optimal performance for different user contexts while keeping resource consumption in check.
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Kenya Country Head Veerakumar Natarajan stressed that Zoho’s AI development approach prioritises data privacy, with all processing kept on Zoho’s servers. “By building our AI in-house, we give Kenyan businesses the tools to boost productivity without compromising security,” he said.
The company also introduced Zia Agent Studio, a no-code platform enabling organisations to create AI agents for tasks such as customer service triage, recruitment screening, and sales opportunity analysis. Over 25 ready-to-deploy agents are now available through the Zia Agent Marketplace, with future enhancements including inter-agent collaboration and expanded skills for finance and support teams.
In addition, Zoho unveiled its Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for secure interoperability between Zoho apps and third-party tools, as well as proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models designed for inclusive, low-latency performance across diverse languages.
Associate Director for Strategic Growth (MEA) Premanand Velumani summed up Zoho’s vision: “Our focus is on co-creation — giving businesses in Kenya AI that is not just powerful but practical, verifiable, and deeply integrated into their workflows.”
With strong growth momentum and a deepening local footprint, Zoho is positioning itself as both a technology innovator and a committed partner to Kenya’s digital transformation journey.
