Movers And Shakers Of The Week [9-14 Oct]

Aditya Birla Group has approached Flipkart and several other companies to help rehabilitate employees of its soon-to-be-shut online retail venture Abof.com. The Mumbai-based conglomerate has also offered to sell Abof’s private label ‘abof ’ to Flipkart.

Let’s have a look at other movers and shakers of the week.

Blume Ventures Onboards IBM Veteran Radhesh Kanumury

Blume Ventures has appointed Radhesh Kanumury as Venture Advisor. In addition to spearheading the firm’s Enterprise Innovation efforts, in his new role, Radhesh would be responsible for investments and will be mentoring startups in the Seed/Angel stage focused on the B2B space.

Radhesh comes with a solid experience of mentoring startups. He earlier ran the Startup initiative of IBM India, called the Global Entrepreneur Program (GEP) and was instrumental in steering the GEP from scratch to the status of a major initiative reckoned by India’s startup ecosystem.

a, called the Global Entrepreneur Program (GEP) and was instrumental in steering the GEP from scratch to the status of a major initiative reckoned by India’s startup ecosystem.

The programme also translated in strong revenues for IBM India’s Cloud business. In addition, he also conceptualized and executed IBM India’s biggest B2B startup challenge, IBM India Smartcamp.

MobiKwik Hires Former Jabong VP To Lead The Payment Gateway Business

MobiKwik has appointed Rukaiya Rangwala as the Business Head of MobiKwik Payment Gateway to drive the growth of the entity.

Rukaiya has over 15 years of experience in the technology & ecommerce industry and has worked across the US, Singapore, Japan and India. She spent eight years at Dell prior to coming to India with Rocket Internet, helping the VC establish its portfolio in the country.

At Rocket, she helped establish Groupon India (taking the company pan-India) and was responsible for the Marketplace division at Jabong (managing a $100m annual top line) making it the fastest growing and most profitable division at Jabong. Before joining MobiKwik, she spent 2 years working on entrepreneurial ventures.

Facebook India Managing Director Umang Bedi Hands In His Resignation

Umang Bedi, Managing Director of Facebook India & Southeast Asia, has submitted his resignation just over a year after he joined the social media company. According to sources, he will be moving on by the end of 2017.

Bedi joined Facebook in June 2016 after the then MD Krithiga Reddy moved to the company’s headquarters in California, United States.

Meanwhile, the social networking giant has reportedly named Sandeep Bhushan, former Director of GTM, IT & Mobile Business at Samsung Electronics, the interim MD. For the last couple of years, as the Director of Consumer and Media at Facebook, Bhushan has been responsible for leading the company’s monetisation strategy and delivery across the largest domains in India and South Asia.

Prior to that, Bhushan was a part of Hindustan Times, where he spent several years working first as the COO of Livemint and later as the VP Digital of HT Media.

Before joining Facebook, Bedi assumed the role of Managing Director – Southeast Asia at Adobe. As the MD of Facebook India, Bedi was responsible for building and maintaining strategic relationships with clients and regional agencies across the region.

IndianMoney Appoints Former IBM Executive As COO

Personal finance advisory company IndianMoney.com has appointed Abhijit Goon, former associate director and chief operating officer of IBM India, as its chief operating officer.

Goon spent nearly 22 years at IBM Global Services.where he held several leadership positions across departments such as associate director of IBM India, COO of application innovation consulting Greater China Group, and COO of IBM Global Services Pte Ltd

At IBM, he held several leadership positions across departments such as associate director of IBM India, COO of application innovation consulting Greater China Group, and COO of IBM Global Services Pte Ltd.

Little Black Book Appoints Rohit Jain As Chief Technology Officer

Little Black Book has appointed Rohit Jain as its Chief Technology Officer. At LBB, Rohit will be building out the machine learning and user behavior analysis capabilities of the platform to give users a truly personalised local discovery experience. He will also be leading engineering efforts to mobilise video recommendations & consumer transactions on the platform.

A technology leader at his core, Rohit comes with over 10 years of vast experience in the internet and mobile industry, with varied experiences in high-energy start-ups. His expertise lies in building complex and scalable web and mobile applications and creating innovative solutions for varied businesses.

An Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT) graduate Rohit started his career at Goibibo as a Software engineer and was last working as the Associate Director of Technology at Knowlarity – Cloud Communications. At Knowlarity he was leading the engineering and product teams on ideation, planning, execution, monitoring, performance, optimisation, and analysis. He has also worked with Brave Bison in the past.

Zivame Names Sumeet Yadav As Its Executive Chairman

Zivame has appointed Sumeet Yadav as the Executive Chairman. He will strengthen Zivame’s efforts in diversifying its portfolio and furthering growth by intensifying its omni channel presence. Sumeet Yadav has had a successful track record of launching and building international retail brands in India. He would be joining Zivame from Nando’s, a leading F&B brand, where he is the CEO for India. In his previous roles, Sumeet has been the Country Head for Tommy Hilfiger and Nautica.

Stay tuned for the movers and shakers of the next week!