Movers And Shakers Of The Week [19-24 Feb 2018]

We bring to you the weekly dope of important movers and shakers from the Indian startup ecosystem.

Suneel Monhot Joins BigWin Infotech As Director

BigWin Infotech, a government recognized fintech startup has appointed Suneel Mohnot a the Director on its board.

Sunil Monhot has served fortune 500 company Reliance Industries as Sr. VP Commercial and bluechip companies like Welspun group as President-Commercial. He has over 33 years of experience as a commercial and business expert and gained immense general management experience including strong emphasis on commercial functions, setting up/ running businesses and designing systems to improve efficiencies.

BigWin Infotech is a self-funded startup who has recently forayed into P2P lending business through its solely owned market place PaisaDukan.com post revised RBI guidelines for NBFC-P2P and one of the strong contenders for NBFC-P2P license.

Equanimity Investments Ropes In Investment Guru, Mark Mobius

Mark Mobius, the former Executive Chairman of Templeton Emerging Markets Group and a prominent emerging markets fund manager, has joined Equanimity Investments’ Investment Committee (IC).

Mobius will help the company in evaluating investment proposals, directing investment and exit decisions and also reviewing the overall portfolio on an ongoing basis.

Mark Mobius, who backs Equanimity Investments, left Templeton Emerging Markets Group in January 2018.

Launched in 2017 by Rajesh Sehgal, Equanimity Investments invests in companies with innovative business models that are engaged in the development of new products or services. Equanimity Investments also recently announced first close of its $31.4 Mn fund with $11 Mn (INR 70 Cr).

Amazon Hires Flipkart’s Mayank Jain For Amazon Payments

Amazon has appointed Flipkart’s senior executive, Mayank Jain a the data scientist. In his new role, Mayank will work on strategic new initiatives for the company.

Jain has been accredited to the launch of Flipkart’s ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ program. Prior to joining Amazon, he was looking at Flipkart’s financial services which included credit modelling, operations and business development across seller financing, consumer lending, and insurance.

SpringRole Appoints Alex Waters As An Advisor

SpringRole has brought on Alex Waters as an advisor to the company. Alex, co-founder and head of EMI Labs, will look after the day to day operations for all aspects of SpringRole’s businesses.

Alex, with his experience in Bitcoin, technology and entrepreneurship, will help the company build its product and push it forward in the field of blockchain.

He has worked in managerial roles with tech and fintech companies like  BitInstant, itBit, and Project PAI. He has been involved in setting up companies like coin.co, a bitcoin payments company; Coin Apex, digital currency and blockchain research organisation among others.

Alex also works as an advisor to businesses, journalists, attorneys and others in the cryptocurrency space, both individually and through his tech consultancy, ELM Labs.

SpringRole, founded in 2014 by Benoit Vatere and Kartik Mandaville, is an online reputation network powered by artificial intelligence and the blockchain technology.

Mike Tamir Joins Simplilearn As A Course Advisor

Simplilearn has appointed Mike Tamir, as the course advisor for its Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning curriculum.

At Simplilearn, Tamir will work as a Subject Matter Expert and Course Advisor for Simplilearn. He will work with the company’s content team and other influencers and guide them in the latest AI curricula that include the Artificial Intelligence Engineer Program, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning with TensorFlow courses.

Mike currently serves as Head of Data Science at Uber ATG (self-driving vehicles) and is a lecturer for the University of California, Berkeley iSchool Data Science Master’s Program.

He has led several Data Science teams, including as Chief Data Scientist for InterTrust and Takt, and Director of Data Sciences for MetaScale. He also created the MS in Data Science program in partnership with the University of New Hampshire.

Mike’s career in academia began as a mathematics teaching fellow for Columbia University and graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, where he received his Ph.D. for work on Modeling Applications in General Relativity and Quantum Statistical Mechanics.

Myntra CPO Ambarish Kenghe & CRO Naresh Krishnaswamy Quit

Two senior executives of Myntra: Ambarish Kenghe and Naresh Krishnaswamy have quit the company.

Both the executives will work for the company till the end of the current financial year for a smooth transition.

Chief Product Officer, Ambarish Kenghe, joined Myntra in 2015 as a part of its core leadership team. He was involved with technology-enabled product offering in Myntra’s offline foray.

Chief Revenue Officer, Naresh Krishnaswamy, had joined Myntra in 2012 as a business analyst and has been involved with looking at firm’s growth and revenue.

Myntra, as a fashion subsidiary of Flipkart since 2014, has been exploring different avenues of growth. The company had opened its first offline store with Roadster in 2017, and recently was planning to open its beauty and wellness store.

Paytm Strengthens Its Board Of Directors, Appoints Pallavi S. Shroff

Paytm has appointed Pallavi S. Shroff to its Board of Directors. Pallavi, with her 34 years of experience in law, will help Paytm grow its financial business in her new role.

Paytm has been planning to build its financial services business and aims to provide access to lending, insurance, insurance and wealth management solutions to a large, under-served population. The company hopes to benefit in achieving its goals with Shroff’s participation in the board.

Shroff founded Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas law firm and is its Managing Partner. She also sits on the board of companies like Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, Apollo Tyres, Trident Group, and Juniper Hotels Ltd.

She has been representing public and private corporations and other entities before legal institutions. She is an expert in matters of dispute resolution and arbitration and competition law and has earned national and international acclaim.

At present, the board of Paytm includes Kabir Misra, Managing Partner at SoftBank Capital, Joe Tsai, Vice Chairman at Alibaba Group Holding Limited, former Google executive Amit Singhal, Mark Schwartz, the Vice Chairman of the Goldman Sachs Group and Chairman of Goldman Sachs in Asia-Pacific, Ravi Adusumalli of SAIF Partners and Eric Jing, CEO of Ant Financial.

Paytm under the leadership of its Founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma started as a digital payments solution. Since then the company has explored various verticals like Paytm Payments Bank, Paytm Mall, the messaging chat feature Paytm Inbox, insurance, online grocery delivery with BigBasket, online ticket booking, initiatives to set up a money market fund, partnership with PVR and more.

Stay tuned for the next edition of Movers And Shakers Of The Week!

Update: 26th February, 23:50 

The earlier version of the story has mistakenly linked wrong profile and the picture of Mayank Jain, the same has been corrected now. We apologise to our readers for any confusion this might have caused.