As Perplexity bids for Chrome and Zoho and Zerodha quietly outpace global incumbents, a new era emerges where conviction, not capital, defines the future of innovation.
In the summer of 2025, the technology world witnessed an audacity few could have imagined. Perplexity AI, barely three years old and valued at $18 billion, announced a $34.5 billion cash bid for Google’s Chrome browser, the gateway for over 3.2 billion users worldwide. For context, this was a startup the size of Reddit attempting a takeover nearly as large as Adobe’s $35 billion Figma acquisition. In doing so, it challenged not just Google but the very hierarchy of global innovation.
What makes this extraordinary is that Perplexity is not an isolated outlier. In India, Zoho and Zerodha one born in a Tamil Nadu village, the other in a modest Bangalore office have already demonstrated that the future of entrepreneurship does not belong to those with the deepest pockets but to those with the deepest convictions. Together, Zoho, Zerodha, and Perplexity offer a template for the twenty-first century: startups that challenge the scale of Salesforce, SAP, Robinhood, Schwab, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic without playing by their rules.
Origins: Small Beginnings, Global Ambitions
When Sridhar Vembu started AdventNet (later Zoho) in 1996, Salesforce (founded 1999) was raising millions in Silicon Valley. Today, Salesforce commands 150,000 enterprise clients and $35 billion in revenue; SAP serves 400,000 corporates worldwide. Yet Zoho, built with zero venture capital, now serves 100 million users in 150 countries. Its Zoho One suite costs $37 per user per month a fraction of Salesforce’s fees democratizing enterprise software for schools, hospitals, micro-factories, and corner shops. If Salesforce is the software of the Fortune 500, Zoho is the software of the Global 5 million.
In 2010, while Robinhood was still an idea and Charles Schwab already managed trillions, Nithin and Nikhil Kamath launched Zerodha. Today, Schwab’s 34 million accounts oversee $9 trillion AUM, Robinhood boasts 23 million funded accounts, but Zerodha entirely bootstrapped handles 12 million Indian investors, representing 15% of India’s daily trading volumes. Where Robinhood leans on order-flow payments (~$1.4 billion annually), Zerodha thrives on a simple ₹20 flat fee, proving that transparency scales faster than gimmicks.
Meanwhile, Perplexity confronts the world’s most entrenched monopoly. Google owns 90% of the $200 billion global search market; Microsoft, leveraging OpenAI, has clawed back to 8%.
