Movers And Shakers Of The Week [03-08 Dec 2018]

We bring to you the latest edition of Movers and Shakers of the Indian startup ecosystem.

This week in the Indian startup ecosystem, Mumbai-headquartered online travel company Cleartrip laid off 80-100 employees in India as it sees declining hotel and flight bookings on the platform. The layoffs have been made across its offices in Gurugram, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. Cleartrip’s India business has seen a slowdown in the last few years, with its market share falling in both flight and hotel booking space due to increasing competition.

At the same time, Japanese internet company Rakuten is looking to double its headcount in India in the next 12-18 months as it looks at moving the centre of gravity of its technology operations to the country.

Here are other movers and shakers of the Indian startup ecosystem.

Facebook’s Kirthiga Reddy Joins SoftBank Investment Advisers

Facebook India’s ex-managing director Kirthiga Reddy will join SoftBank Investment Advisers as their first venture partner.

Reddy is known for her technical and business expertise – from both enterprise and consumer technology, in developed and emerging markets.

At SoftBank she will be based out of the San Carlos, Silicon Valley office. In her new role, she will be working closely with Deep Nishar, senior managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisors on frontier technologies – AI, robotics, health tech, bioengineering, semis, IoT, quantum computing, and more – with an aim to enable the next stage of the information revolution.

Knowlarity Appoints Yatish Mehrotra As CEO

Delhi-based cloud communications provider Knowlarity has appointed veteran telecom professional Yatish Mehrotra as its CEO.

With over 25 years of experience, Mehrotra was the business head – Consumer Business at Tata Teleservices Ltd. Prior to this, he has also been associated with Airtel as the COO of its Karnataka circle and was heavily involved in the launch of some of the most successful products from the Airtel Brand. He has also worked with Escotel in various roles across the business, marketing, and sales functions.

In his new role, Yatish will spearhead the company’s overall business and growth strategy. He will also leverage his extensive domain experience to drive expansion and profitability for Knowlarity.

NiYO Strengthens Leadership Team

Digital banking solutions provider NiYO appointed Gourav Kumar as head of finance and Kugesh Veeraraghavan as head of engineering.

Kumar comes with over 13 years of leadership experience in corporate strategy, general management, finance, HR, operations and process improvement. Prior to NiYO, Gourav has had diverse experiences in senior finance roles in both high growth startups and global organizations like Hotstar, MobiKwik, Havas Worldwide and Larsen & Tourbo Ltd.

Veeraraghavan brings over two decades of experience in enterprise storage and software. Before joining NiYO, Kugesh was with NetApp where he was managing engineering cloud operations. Prior to that, he has worked with EMC and Xerox Corporation.

In their new roles, Gourav Kumar will be responsible for designing and implementing financial systems and making business processes more robust for the company; while Kugesh Veeraraghavan will be responsible to churn out state-of-the-art technology products and help NiYO adhere to industry best practices.

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

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