Tech Giant Zoho Comes To Newcastle

With dozens of cloud-based products for new and growing businesses, the Zoho team first contacted Plan Digital in July after reading about its annual Newcastle Startup Week festival in May and all its other work to help people start and grow businesses in the North East of England and across the UK.

Following a Skype call, several emails and a visit to Newcastle for their Founders’ Friday event in September, Zoho offered to sponsor the events for the next six months with a particular focus on helping local businesses understand how to use their Zoho Books accounting software to manage their finances better.

Sridhar Iyengar, Head of Operations for Zoho, Europe, said: “Having experienced the entrepreneurial journey ourselves, we truly understand the needs of an entrepreneur. We grew organically over the last 22 years and today 40 million users use our platforms globally! Our efforts in building products have solely been to reduce the technology barrier for any company to grow their business. We are impressed with the founders community in Newcastle and excited to associate our brand with the Founders’ Friday events.”

Paul Lancaster, Founder & Director, Plan Digital, said: “I was surprised and delighted when the Zoho team got in touch as they are a huge company with a fantastic range of cloud products covering everything you need to run a business including accounting, CRM, sales, marketing, HR, IT and team collaboration tools. This is great validation for our Newcastle Startup Week, Newcastle Scaleup Summit and Founders’ Friday events as a way of not only engaging with the local business community but attracting the attention of global giants like Zoho who then want to invest time, money and resources into our region.”

Zoho’s sponsorship begins this month when Varun Singh (Head of Marketing, Zoho Books) will be speaking at the next free Founders’ Friday event taking place at the Tuspark Eagle Lab co-working space on Friday 30^th November.