ZKTOR.
Press Conference Held at Constitution Club of India, New Delhi.
The rise of ZKTOR marks more than the launch of another Indian social media platform. It reflects a deeper question now facing India and South Asia: can digital participation be built on dignity, safety and local realities rather than data extraction, behavioural surveillance and unread consent documents?
Developed by Softa Technologies, ZKTOR is being positioned as an all-in-one Indian social platform for a time shaped by artificial intelligence, deepfakes, cyber insecurity and growing unease with unpredictable online spaces. Its design places privacy and data safety at the foundation through Zero Knowledge Server Architecture, No URL Media Architecture, no behaviour tracking and default multi-layer encryption.
This framework appears to be connecting with younger users, especially Gen Z and young women across India and South Asia. For them, the platform's value is not only technological; it is social. A cleaner, more controlled and predictable digital environment can feel safer in shared family spaces, more respectful of reputation and better suited to meaningful participation.
At the centre of this project is Sunil Kumar Singh, founder of Softa Technologies, whose thinking draws from rural Bihar roots and more than two decades in Finland's restrained, disciplined and rights-conscious design culture. Singh's core argument is simple but forceful: user-protection technologies were never missing; the will to make them default was. ZKTOR therefore challenges the existing platform economy by treating digital rights as built-in conditions, not optional promises buried inside policy documents.
Singh has described ZKTOR as an ethical response to the familiar I accept model. In rural India and South Asia, millions of users do not understand complex terms, privacy policies, data clauses or their own digital rights. Asking such users to accept legalistic documents, he argues, creates a disguised imbalance between educated platform builders and digitally vulnerable citizens. For him, privacy by design, No URL Media Architecture and media misuse prevention are less about technical display and more about moral intent.
The wider Softa ecosystem extends this rights-based idea into local economic infrastructure. Subkuz is being built for hyperlocal news and diaspora communities, Ezowm for hyperlocal commerce, Hola AI as a safety and intelligence layer, and ZHAN as a transparent hyperlocal advertising network. ZHAN targets India's existing local advertising economy, which still runs through newspapers, radio, agencies and district networks, especially in smaller cities and rural regions where trust, language and familiarity decide reach.
Less than six months after Singh introduced ZKTOR at New Delhi's Constitution Club of India, the platform expanded beyond India into Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, crossing half a million beta users, largely from Gen Z. Strong acceptance among young users and women has encouraged Softa to announce beta rollout in Bhutan, Pakistan and Maldives, turning the platform into a wider South Asian experiment in Indian technology.
Reports in Prabhat Khaba, Financial Express and Kathmandu Post say Singh refused foreign VC funding and Finland/EU grants to keep ZKTOR free from external, political or institutional pressure. Softa also claims an ISRO-like model that allows the platform to operate 7-8 times cheaper than big-tech alternatives.
Singh's larger ambition is district-level digital infrastructure: one national brand with local digital identities connecting social media, commerce, creators, entertainment, news, governance, civil society, education, police, judiciary and citizens. If realised, Softa believes this model could create lakhs of direct jobs, empower small, women-led and home-based businesses, reduce youth migration, digitise rural markets, boost GDP and serve as a technology mission inspired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Vision 2047 and dedicated to India.
