Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, is making major enhancements to Catalyst by Zoho, its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)—weaving agentic development capabilities directly into the coding environments developers already use.
According to the company, additions to the platform include Agent Skills, a non-interactive command-line interface (CLI), and Model Context Protocol (MCP) support to Catalyst's platform, along with new integrations for agentic AI coding assistants including Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex.
Catalyst by Zoho is also now offering a free student program that includes full-stack hosting, functions, database, and AI tooling to enhance accessibility and empower future developers.
The platform bridges the gap between code generation and reliable deployment by giving agentic AI coding assistants a structured, deterministic way to build and deploy applications, Zoho said.
Developers can use the AI coding assistants of their choice while Catalyst provides the underlying full-stack serverless infrastructure and controls, eliminating the need to stitch together multiple cloud services and vendors. This approach simplifies development and future iterations while reducing operational complexity, positioning Catalyst as a reliable partner as technical capabilities and customer needs evolve, said the vendor.
"By delivering an agent-ready, serverless full-stack platform, Catalyst gives developers and AI agents complete cloud independence to build, deploy, and scale intelligent applications, with far less operational overhead," said Anand Nergunam, vice president, revenue growth at Zoho. "Additionally, to democratize access we are launching a free student tier, freeing students from the burden of traditional development cycles so they can thrive in a rapidly shifting landscape."
AI coding assistants can generate code quickly, but getting it to production requires deep platform knowledge, cloud services, and deployment workflows. Catalyst brings these together on a single serverless full-stack cloud, offering AI coding assistants what they need to build, test, and deploy applications.
Applications built on Catalyst run inside Zoho's own data centers and inherit Zoho's robust security infrastructure, including DDoS protection, SOC compliance, regular vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (VAPT), a web application firewall, and more.
Human oversight is built into the deployment process rather than added afterward, giving organizations greater control as AI becomes part of application development.
Catalyst is advancing towards a new era of agentic software development, where developers can collaborate with increasingly capable AI agents to execute sophisticated workflows across the software development lifecycle—all on a governed, full-stack cloud foundation. Forthcoming changes include multi-agent hosting, AI tool connectors, agentic SDLC, and more, Zoho noted.
"We needed a better way to manage multiple integrations into CRM as well as workflows based on data in CRM, which can get complex as you add more layers," said Greg Barnes, chief operating officer at MAP Communications. "While, I'm not part of our development team, I was able to use the Signals feature in Catalyst to build and deploy multiple custom workflows within an hour or two. As a business user, the ability to leverage Catalyst's AI and Catalyst skills with my favorite coding model, makes it painless to solve new business use cases. Catalyst is a game changer for me and our marketing integrations team that is hands on in Zoho."
Catalyst by Zoho offers a monthly free tier for developers to explore the platform, plus $250 in free credits for users who want to go deeper over a six-month period. Catalyst is available for immediate use.
Catalyst remains completely free for students, with no subscription or credit card required to deploy non-commercial applications.
For more information about this news, visit www.zoho.com.