Movers And Shakers Of The Week [18 July – 23 July]

Flipkart is seeing more exits of top managers with two executives – Lalit Sarna and Sunil Gopinath also leaving the company. Sarna was the payments product lead for Flipkart while Gopinath was the product lead for the marketplace division.

Let’s Have A look At More Exits & Hirings

Google’s Sunil Rao Joins Lightspeed

Sunil will be formerly joining Lightspeed in September as Partner of business services and community. Since the last ten years, Sunil has been working with startups. His role at Google, where he spent the last five years, majorly consisted on driving its mentoring programme – Google Launchpad, playing a key role in its accelerator programme and the more recent Sandhill programs for later stage startups

Harsha Kumar Joins Lightspeed India

Harsha Kumar has joined Lightspeed India as Principal, looking at consumer and B2B opportunities. She comes to Lightspeed India with 11 years of experience in technology and product management at many top organizations. She was most recently AVP Product at Olacabs. Prior to Olacabs, Harsha led product for Adnear, an advertising technology company, and managed DAU and revenue for Cafe World and Mafia Wars, two of Zynga’s flagship games. Prior to Zynga, Harsha spent six years at Persistent Systems as an engineer and product lead. Harsha received an MBA from INSEAD and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science Engineering from Cummins College of Engineering in Pune.

Uniphore Appoints Baskar Subramanian As New Board Member

Uniphore Software Systems, a speech recognition solutions company, appointed Baskar Subramanian as a Board Member. Baskar will help Uniphore formulate its overall strategy with special emphasis on geographical expansions, strategic partnerships, and affiliations. Baskar founded Servion Global Solutions Limited, a global end-to-end consulting-led organisation in proactive customer experience in 1992, and pioneered voice automation and computer telephony technologies for many enterprises in India, Middle East, Asia Pacific and the United States.

Caratlane Promotes Employees As Co-Founders

CaratLane, an online private label jewellery brand, promoted its two senior-most employees, Avinash Anand and Gurukeerthi G as co-founders, along with Mithun Sacheti, founder and CEO of the company. Avinash was earlier working as Sr. VP – Product & Category and Gurukeerthi G, as Sr. VP – Technology & Fulfilment.

Avnish who earned his master’s degree from IIM Lucknow is the 1st employee of CaratLane and he has, since the very beginning, firmly believed in all things that CaratLane stood for.

Guru comes from IIM Bangalore and has been with CaratLane for the last five years. He has shaped and strengthened the backbone of CaratLane – the technology support, while also being instrumental in supporting the Fulfilment function.

Navin Chandani Joins BankBazaar.com

BankBazaar.com announced the appointment of Navin Chandani as Chief Business Development Officer. Chandani was previously the Senior Director and Head –Segment Solutions & Consumer Experiences – India & South Asia at VISA. Based in Mumbai, Chandani will be responsible for business development and getting more partners for the marketplace. A veteran of financial services in the digital era, Chandani previously managed Large & Mid Corporate, Small Business, Traveller, Affluent & Millennial segments for VISA’s India and South Asia operations as the Senior Director. Chandani is an alumnus of Loyola College and Symbiosis International University, and comes with more than 20 years’ experience in leading high performing sales, relationship, and product management teams in payments, financial services, and digital marketing.

Rukaiya Kanchwala Joins Omnipresent Robotics

Omnipresent Robotics, an industrial drone and machine learning solutions provider, has hired ClassVerse founder Rukaiya Kanchwala as chief business officer. Kanchwala’s move to join Omnipresent comes after she shut ClassVerse earlier this year. She had launched ClassVerse last year and operated the fitness studio marketplace for nearly 10 months. Kanchwala, who has an MBA degree from INSEAD, has about 12 years of experience in the technology industry across the US, Singapore, Japan and India. She spent eight years at Dell before coming to India to join Rocket Internet. At Rocket Internet, Kanchwala helped establish Groupon India and expand the company’s operations across India. She then moved to Jabong, where she last headed the fashion e-tailer’s marketplace division.

Faircent Makes A Series Of Senior Appointments

Peer- to- peer (P2P) lending marketplace, Faircent.com, announced the appointment of Shivam Gupta, who was a part of the global risk management team of Standard Chartered Bank, as chief risk officer and Karun Thareja, who was a part of the leadership at an analytics startup called WyzMindz, as head of marketing.

Gupta is an experienced banker with 12 years of experience in risk management across retail and business lending spanning all markets in South East Asia region. In this position he will be responsible for Risk & Risk Analytics, Operations & Collection.

Thareja, on the other hand has extensive experience in Marketing, Sales and Business Management spanning more than 20 years. His domain expertise includes Analytics, Enterprise Systems, Contact Center Management and Process Management. In his prior roles he has led multi-fold growth in business units at companies like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Dassault Systems and NIIT.

Amit Choudhary Joins Motilal Oswal PE

Ex-Snapdeal SVP Amit Choudhary has joined Motilal Oswal Private Equity Investment Advisors, the PE arm of Motilal Oswal Financial Services. Choudhary spent a little over a year at SoftBank, Foxconn and Alibaba Group-backed Snapdeal, where he was responsible for driving overall controllership in finance, FP&A and taxation at the group level. Prior to joining the online marketplace, he spent over a decade with fast moving consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble, in India and Asia. In his last assignment in P&G, Choudhary served as regional finance head for its Asia Pet Care business across 14 countries, including, Japan, Greater China and Australia.

BankBazaar Hires Visa’s Navin Chandani

BankBazaar.com appointed Navin Chandani as Chief Business Development Officer. Chandani was previously the Senior Director and Head –Segment Solutions & Consumer Experiences – India & South Asia at VISA. Based in Mumbai, Chandani will be responsible for business development and getting more partners for the marketplace. A veteran of financial services in the digital era, Chandani previously managed Large & Mid Corporate, Small Business, Traveller, Affluent & Millennial segments for VISA’s India and South Asia operations as the Senior Director. Chandani is an alumnus of Loyola College and Symbiosis International University, and comes with more than 20 years’ experience in leading high performing sales, relationship, and product management teams in payments, financial services, and digital marketing.