Sridhar Vembu doubles down on East India Company comparison for Big Tech, says ‘bigger than most sovereign nations’

Zoho Corporation co-founder Sridhar Vembu has doubled down on his comparison of Big Tech with the erstwhile British East India Company (EIC), noting the bloc's power and pull when it comes to attracting finance and creating value.

Just weeks after he first made the analogy, Vembu, who is also Chief Scientist of the software firm, noted that these capital intensive and ambitious corporates are “bigger than most sovereign nations”.

Big tech the new ‘East India Company’? Sridhar Vembu thinks so…

“Big tech is bigger than most sovereign nations. “East India Company” is the way to think about them,” Vembu wrote on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), on 14 February.

He was responding to a post which compared Google parent Alphabet's newest funding round, where it raised $32 billion of debt in 24 hours — compared to 100 days that the Indian government may take to raise a similar amount, and 100-year bond issue, compared to India's 40-year bonds.

History is circular: Vembu calls its ironic

Notably, he made similar remarks in January too, while sharing his opinion on France's decision to shift from American video meeting platforms (Zoom and Microsoft Teams) to a domestic alternative called Visio. Vembu called for “technology sovereignty” and encouraged countries to assert greater control over their digital infrastructure.

In a post on X on 27 January, Vembu compared Big Tech to the historic East India Company and called it “ironic” that Europe “are now waking up to it”.

The implication from the tech leader's statements is that like the East India company, which wielded vast power and influence over the economy, markets and trade in Britain's colonies in Asia, today, it is Big Tech majors who are playing a similar role globally.

How did netizens react? ‘Not evil, same descendants, right mental model…’

The reactions to Vembu's latest post on the matter were mixed, with some users agreeing to the comparison, while others feeling there are distinct differences and some other noting that the change is in name only — then and now, the beneficiaries remain the same.

“Big tech's revenues exceed the GDP of ¬75% of countries. Not just scale. That's private power rivaling sovereign states. The East India Company is the right mental model,” wrote one user.

Another agreed, “Goes deeper than scale though. EIC controlled trade routes, big tech controls data routes. Running business infra across 3 countries and every cloud pricing change or API deprecation sends you scrambling, the dependency is invisible until the terms change.”

While one user felt the two are not comparable, stating: “East India Company had a zero-sum mindset. That's why they were an extractive, evil corporation. Big Tech believes in positive sum philosophy and actually committed to solve hard problems. They will be a net positive to the world.”

And another user felt that while the names are changed, the people benefitting are the same. “Descendants of majority shareholders of EIC are now ultimately majority shareholders of almost all US companies,” they wrote.

Some others also had ironic and funny comments like, “West India Company. H1B powered.”