Paytm's Senior Vice President quits, Blueshift hires ex-Walmart and Groupon executives – the executive shuffles this week

Saturday June 18, 2016 , 3 min Read

It is the third week of June, and the world of startups is as always buzzing with activity. Last week seemed to be all about technology teams, with Facebook announcing its new India lead, Flipkart making rejigs to its technology team and Snapdeal deciding to not hire a CPO. On the other hand, this week was about startups roping in top executives from corporate house. Take a look:

Vijay Shekhar Sharma (in pic) just lost one of the top senior level executives at Paytm

Blueshift hires former Walmart Labs and Groupon executives

San Francisco-based Blueshift, marketing automation platform, added two senior level executives in their pursuit to expand in the Asia- Pacific region.

Dhruv Shanker who was the Head of Affiliate Marketing in Asia-Pacific for Groupon left his role this week to join as the Vice President and Head of APAC for Blueshift and will be based out of Singapore. As VP and Head of APAC, Dhruv will lead Blueshift’s expansion by establishing and developing relationships with brands and other leading marketers in the region.

Before Groupon, Dhruv has also worked for Yahoo!, Google and Dell at various strategic levels.

On the other hand, Nipun Bhatia joins as the Vice President of Engineering to launch the company’s operations in India. Before joining the marketing startup, Nipun was the Senior Director of Engineering, Smart Pricing, and led the team responsible for designing and executing the pricing platform that powered Walmart‘s Global eCommerce.

A Standford University graduate, Nipun has worked with Kosmix and Oracle in the Silicon Valley.

Blueshift has been co-founded by Indian founders, Manyam Mallela, Mehul Shah and Vijay Chittoor.

POKKT has a new Associate Vice President for APAC region

Mobile video advertising platform POKKT that focuses on video advertisements in mobile games hired Kaye Quema as the Associate Vice President of the APAC region. Already having offices in Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam and Philippines, Kaye will look to accelerate the company’s expansion in the South East Asian markets.

Having an experience of over nine years in advertising sales and operations, Kaye was heading Operations and Sales of Yahoo in Jakarta in 2014 and moved to Singapore in 2015.

Senior Vice President at Paytm quits to start venture

Vikas Purohit, who was the Senior Vice President at Paytm, quit the internet giant to start up.

Vikas joined the company in 2015 and was looking at the business correspondent network for Paytm's upcoming payment banks business.

Before Paytm, Vikas was the former head at Amazon India. Now, he plans to start his customer experience firm along with ex-McKinsey executive Apoorv Gautam and another Paytm employee.

Before his two-year stint at Amazon India, Purohit worked with Tommy Hilfiger, Reliance Brands and Madura Garments for more than 10 years.

June is also witnessing an uptick in funding, especially in the FinTech space with companies like CreditVidya and ClearTax raising large amounts of money in investments. This will cause a shift in senior level executives leaving the Indian esteemed ‘unicorns’ to join smaller startups. We are already seeing a shift with companies like InMobi and Flipkart rumoured to be losing its talent base drastically.