Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu has responded to Y Combinator President Garry Tan's jab that the SaaS company's business could be easily seized by vibe coded apps, saying that Zoho's business was still seeing "rapid customer growth exceeding 50%."
On the social media platform X on December 2, Mr. Tan had pointed to an article on Mr. Vembu's suspicions around the hype of vibe coding.
"Zoho's business would be first to be competed away by people building their own custom software built by people using Replit, Emergent and Taskade. Why pay $30/seat/month for over bundled SaaS when soon even non-tech ops ppl can vibe-code a custom solution in a weekend?" Mr. Tan had tweeted.
In turn, Mr. Vembu questioned why legitimate vibe coded email or spreadsheet or accounting apps weren't already being used instead.
"My own personal R&D project is to enable huge gains in programmer productivity by combining compiler technology with AI. Our goal is to enable a quantum leap in programmer productivity while being able to provide security, privacy and compliance guarantees. Without those guarantees, vibe coding just piles up tech debt faster and faster until the whole thing collapses," he went on.
Mr. Vembu then took a shot at Mr. Tan, claiming that for people like him, tech debt is to be "pawned off on unsuspecting acquirers." He bet that Zoho would surpass vibe coding companies.
Multiple users agreed with Mr. Vembu's sentiment, saying Zoho's offerings were valuable and available at an affordable price for smaller businesses.
Generative AI-powered vibe coding startups have grown exponentially since the trend took off sometime ago with players like Cursor, Replit, Bolt driving popularity, and new entrants like Emergent, Composio and TableSprint now joining the segment.