Rajiv Bansal Ends His Journey With Ola
Rajiv Bansal is the fifth high profile exit from Ola in less than a year’s time.
Ola’s chief financial officer (CFO) Rajiv Bansal, who had left Infosys Ltd. to join the cab aggregator, has put in his papers after spending just over an year at the company. An Ola official, who did not want to be named, confirmed the news to BloombergQuint. Bansal had joined in January 2016.
Pallav Singh, who is vice-president-operations at Ola, has been appointed the interim CFO, a person privy to the development told BloombergQuint. The company did not respond to an e-mail seeking comments on the top-level changes.
The company has been grappling with high-profile exits, with Bansal being the fifth senior executive to quit Ola over the past 12 months.
Pradeep Dodle, head of cabs category management, had quit in April last year, followed by Harsha Kumar, the associate vice-president of product, who left in May. Sundeep Sanhni, who led new initiatives, and Abhimanyu Rawal, head of Ola’s luxury cab category, quit in December last year.
The company did manage to get PepsiCo India veteran, Vishal Kaul, on board as its chief operating officer in January 2017, though.
Ola, which offers app-based mobility solutions, was valued around $5 billion when it raised $500 million in August 2015. Vanguard World Fund recently marked down the value of its shares, bringing the cab-aggregator’s valuation down to $2.5 billion.
Japan’s SoftBank Group on Wednesday also reported a valuation loss of 39.3 billion yen ($351 million) in two of its biggest Indian bets, Ola and Snapdeal.
Top Level Exits
Indian unicorns or companies valued upwards of a billion dollars, like Flipkart, Snapdeal and Ola, have been witnessing top-level exits in recent months.
Recently, Snapdeal witnessed two of its senior level hires bidding adieu to the company. Sandeep Komaravelly, senior vice-president in charge of Snapdeal’s mobile marketplace Shopo.in, quit in January. The handicrafts selling platform is being shut down on February 10. Snapdeal’s Abhishek Kumar also put in his papers.
India’s first unicorn, Flipkart, has seen the maximum number of senior exits over the last one year. India’s largest online retailer has seen a series of valuation markdowns by foreign mutual funds holding minority stake in the company. The latest came in January, when Fidelity Mutual Fund pared the valuation of Flipkart by 36 percent to $5.57 billion for three months ended November, down from $8.71 billion in August.