Movers and Shakers Of The Week [4 -9 May]

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

This week, Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori-led Curefit became the latest entrant to the group of companies laying off employees as a result of the nationwide lockdown. Curefit has decided to lay off around 1,000 employees, while at the same time, it is pulling back on its Tier 2 presence with shutting down of physical fitness centres.

Curefit is now also looking to monetise the free virtual classes it had introduced in late March in light of the coronavirus lockdown. It is said to employ over 8K people across the country.

The fitness startup has offered employees the option of either taking their salary for May along with a final settlement in June or ending their employment in June to show more work experience on their resume and receive a final settlement in June. However, there is no work for these employees regardless of whether they decide to stick around until June.

Meanwhile, social media giant Facebook announced that it has appointed the first 20 members to its Oversight Board. The Board will take final and binding decisions on whether specific content should be allowed or removed from Facebook and Instagram.

Out of the total 20 members, Sudhir Krishnaswamy is the only Indian on the Board. Krishnaswamy is the vice-chancellor of the National Law School of India University.

Other Movers and Shakers Of The Week!

Swiggy CTO Rahul Jaimini Exits

Bengaluru-based foodtech unicorn Swiggy has announced that its cofounder and CTO Rahul Jaimini is moving on from the company. Jaimini will be joining Gurugram-based edtech company Pesto as cofounder. Jaimini had invested in Pesto last year in May.

He will be transitioning from his active role in Swiggy in May but will continue as a shareholder and board member. Currently, Jaimini leads functions like Platform Engineering, Analytics, IT and Labs which will be realigned to Dale Vaz, head of engineering and data science, who has been with the company for close to two years.

Swiggy offers food delivery as well as grocery along with hyperlocal deliveries while Pesto basically aims to enable global pay parity and borderless opportunities for Indian engineers.

Freshworks Hires Tyler Sloat As Chief Financial Officer

SasS startup Freshworks has appointed Tyler Sloat as the chief financial officer of the company. At his new role, Sloat will be responsible for maintaining sustainable growth across its customer segments, overseeing all accounting, finance, legal and IT functions.

Previously, Sloat served as CFO at Zuora, Inc., guiding the subscription payments leader from startup through successful IPO and subsequent quarters as a public company. Prior to Zuora, Sloat held executive finance roles at many companies including NetApp Inc. and Siebel Systems, Inc.

Founded in 2010 as Freshdesk by Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamyas, the company initially was just a helpdesk software for customer support.

FarEye Appoints Amit Bagga

New Delhi-based logistics SaaS startup FarEye appointed Amit Bagga as its chief revenue officer (CRO). Bagga joins FarEye’s leadership team and will focus on key revenue opportunities across sales and operations.

Prior to joining FarEye, Bagga handled Asia Pacific region for Blue Yonder. He has also worked with Oracle and HP as well. FarEye is a Software as a Service mobility platform that aims to solve complicated last-mile delivery issues.

Dream Sports Appoints Dev Bajaj

Dream Sports, leading sports technology company that operates platforms such as Dream11, FanCode and DreamX, has appointed Dev Bajaj as chief corporate development officer.

In his new role, Bajaj will lead investments and drive global strategic partnerships in fantasy sports, sports-tech, gaming and other opportunistic sectors. He will also work closely with leaders of the Dream Sports companies on future fundraising and strategic business planning. Dev has over 17 years of experience across entrepreneurship, venture capital, private equity and investment banking.

Dream Sports is the umbrella company which runs sports fantasy platform Dream11, and sports update platform FanCode, among others.

Zomato’s Nishant Jain Joins BharatPe

Merchant payment and lending network startup BharatPe has appointed Nishant Jain as the chief business officer of the company. Jain will be responsible for facilitating BharatPe’s next phase of growth and will work on the company’s aggressive plans to scale up its footprint to 10 Mn merchants by 2020.

Prior to this, Nishant has worked in leadership roles with Pepsi, Coca Cola, Zomato, among others. He has experience in sales, change management and scaling-up businesses in highly dynamic and competitive environments.

BharatPe is a merchant focused payments and lending platform. It offers merchants a single interface for all existing UPI apps such as PayTM, PhonePe, Google Pay, BHIM, Mobikwik, Freecharge, TrueCaller among 100 other UPI transaction applications.

NODWIN Appoints Lalita Narayan Nayak

NODWIN Gaming has appointed Lalita Narayan Nayak as its new head of sales and marketing. In her new role, Nayak will be in charge of implementing and managing sales and marketing activities. She is expected to identify new market opportunities.

Nayak has an experience of more than 19-year in marketing and has worked on several leadership roles in business planning and development as well as brand management and strategic alliances.

NODWIN Gaming is an esports company which is an independent subsidiary of mobile gaming company Nazara Technologies.

DIGISOL Systems Appoints Sarvesh Mishra

IT networking solutions provider DIGISOL Systems has appointed Sarvesh Mishra as the head of sales and marketing. In this role, he will be responsible for developing sales and marketing strategies and driving growth by focusing on emerging market opportunities.

Sarvesh has 25 years of experience in the networking and telecommunications industry, with experience of various domains including sales and marketing and product management.

New-Delhi based Digisol Systems offers products and solutions catering to voice, data and video services.

TheDataTeam Appoints Pushkaraj Kale

SaaS platform TheDataTeam has appointed Pushkaraj Kale as the cofounder and chief operating officer of the company. He will also join the company’s board of directors.

Kale has an experience of over 27 years in the SaaS industry and will be responsible for expanding and driving the growth of the company’s Cadenz.ai platform in multiple geographies. He will report to Rangarajan Vasudevan, founder and CEO of TheDataTeam.

TheDataTeam offers Cadenz.ai, a customer intelligence platform that provides enterprises live behaviour intelligence about its customers using its data
automatically.

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