Zoho Corporation on September 7, 2026 announced major enhancements to Catalyst by Zoho, its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) product, adding agentic development tools designed to let AI coding assistants build and deploy applications directly from developers’ coding environments. The company said the update, announced in Nairobi, also makes Catalyst free for students building non-commercial applications, with no subscription or credit card required.

According to Zoho, the Catalyst update introduces “Agent Skills,” a non-interactive command-line interface (CLI), and support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Zoho said these capabilities are intended to connect AI tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex to Catalyst’s deployment and infrastructure services, allowing tasks like database creation and schema changes to be performed from tools such as VS Code and other AI-enabled IDEs.

The announcement comes as Kenyan software firms, system integrators and startups increasingly adopt AI-assisted coding to speed development cycles, while still facing operational and governance hurdles when moving prototypes into production environments. Platform tools that reduce the need to combine multiple cloud services can be relevant in a market where teams often balance skills gaps, cost controls and compliance requirements, particularly for regulated sectors such as finance and telecoms.

Veerakumar Natarajan, Country Head at Zoho Kenya, said reliability and deployment remain key bottlenecks even as code generation accelerates. “In a very short period of time, AI coding assistants have transformed how quickly applications can be created, but moving that code into production reliably remains a challenge,” Natarajan said. “Developers still spend significant time managing infrastructure and bringing together separate cloud services. With Catalyst, we are reducing that friction by providing an agent-ready, serverless full-stack platform that helps developers build, deploy and scale intelligent applications with greater control and less operational overhead.”

Zoho said it is keeping human oversight in the deployment process by separating development and production environments and requiring manual promotion of code to production. The company also cited scoped collaborator controls and audit trails for application, platform and MCP tool-call logs, alongside versioning and reversibility for post-launch changes.

In the press release, Zoho also stated that it has made its AI skills available as an open-source repository, and that it is open-sourcing Catalyst’s software development kit (SDK), CLI and its lightweight JavaScript framework, Slyte.

On pricing, Zoho said Catalyst offers a monthly free tier and includes KES 22,500 in free credits for users over a six-month period, for those who want to explore the platform more deeply. The company said Catalyst uses a pay-as-you-go model where features are charged per unit of usage, with budget alerts and spending ceilings available through the Catalyst console, and an optional subscription plan for teams seeking more predictable costs.

For Kenya’s developer ecosystem, the free access for students could lower barriers to experimenting with full-stack deployment and governance practices beyond basic coding. However, the practical impact will depend on adoption by universities, coding bootcamps and employers, and on how well the tools integrate into existing workflows already built around major cloud providers.

Zoho said Catalyst is available for immediate use. The company has not disclosed local uptake targets or expected timelines for broader rollout among Kenyan institutions.