Movers And Shakers Of The Week [08 – 13 October]

We bring to you the latest edition of movers and shakers of the week in the Indian startup ecosystem.

After a year-long search by Facebook, the social media giant had finally appointed HotStar CEO Ajit Mohan as Managing Director and Vice-President for Facebook India recently in September. Following its footsteps, now  US-based global microblogging platform Twitter is looking to hire a country director to head its operations in India. Former Twitter India head Taranjeet Singh had resigned from his post in September. His exit from the platform was reportedly said to be due to weak advertising revenue for nearly three and a half years.

In another development, Helsinki headquartered cybersecurity firm F-Secure has made the appointment of Rahul Kumar as the Country Manager for India & SAARC. Prior to this, Kumar was Country Manager, WinMagic, a data security provider. He will report to Keith Martin, F-Secure’s regional director for Asia Pacific and Japan. Kumar has over a decade of experience across companies like Dassault Systems, Sutherland Global Services and WNS Global Services.

Also, disappearing messaging application Snap has appointed former head of Twitter news for India, Raheel Khursheed, as country expert. Khursheed is Snap’s first India hire and is likely to lead India operations for the company.

Let’s have a look at other movers and shakers:

BlackBuck Appoints Deepak Warrier As Chief Data Scientist Bengaluru

Bengaluru-based logistics startup BlackBuck, owned by Zinka Logistics Solutions Pvt. Ltd has appointed Deepak Warrier as Chief Data Scientist. Warrier will be leading BlackBuck’s data science practice, a core offering.

With a 100+ strong technology team and a strong focus on data, BlackBuck is looking to triple investments in product and technology in the near future

Warrier is a veteran in the field of data science. The PhD in Operations Research from Texas A&M University and NIT Calicut graduate has two decades of experience in this field across multiple industries including transportation, e-commerce, social media and banking.

He has worked and held leadership positions at companies like American Airlines, Citi and Myntra.

QuoDeck Appoints Ex-Amazon Exec To Head Its Global Biz

Game-based human resource learning platform QuoDeck has appointed Venkataraman Ananthkrishnan to lead the company’s online and global business.

Ananthkrishnan has been earlier associated with Amazon India where he was managing the company’s Seller Lending initiative.

He has over 13 years of experience across Institutional and Retail businesses.

QuoDeck is a SaaS-based product that caters to the enterprise learning market, enabling companies to create and deploy game-based mobile learning to train, assess and manage large teams.

Ethinos Digital marketing Expands India leadership Team

Ethinos Digital Marketing, one of the leading digital marketing firms announced expansion of its India leadership team with the appointment of Benedict Hayes as Executive Director of the firm.

Benedict Hayes’ joining follows the appointment of Brijesh Munyal who joined the firm as Joint Managing Director last year.

Prior to joining Ethinos, Benedict was Managing Director, South East Asia for the programmatic platform, Sociomantic Labs (dunnhumby), where he headed business across Asia, servicing leading e-commerce and retail brands. Benedict is not new to the Indian market as prior to Sociomantic he lived and worked in Mumbai for six years and worked as one of the key leaders and EVP of Strategy, of the performance marketing agency, iProspect (DENTSU).

Ben has a diverse range of skills having delivered campaigns for major international brands that span Media, SEO, Social, Content, and Data analytics.

At Ethinos, Ben will be responsible for building and development of Ethinos’ solutions team by building world-class Martech capabilities through technology, partnerships, training and product development.

Ethinos grew by 60% last year and recently touched a milestone of 100 employees. The company has also been selected by Google for the Google Elevator programme and that speaks volumes about the potential and differentiated offering that the company brings.

TeamViewer appoints Krunal Patel as Head of Sales for India

Remote connectivity solutions platform TeamViewer has made the appointment of Krunal Patel as Head of Sales in India. This is a newly created position as part of the company’s APAC initiative, aimed at growing its business in the region.

Prior to this, Patel was Senior Vice President and COO at vCentric Technologies and has worked at firms like SAP and Gartner.

Founded in 2005, the company employs more than 700 people in offices across Germany, the United States, Australia, Armenia and Japan. The company is now focusing on leveraging the market potential in the APAC region for enterprise as well as small and medium enterprise customers for remote access, collaboration and IoT solution.

Stay tuned for the next edition of Movers and Shakers of the week!