More senior execs flee Flipkart; star hire from Google leaves to join Airbnb

Flipkart’s having a really bad year. Just yesterday one of its investors took a chopping axe to its valuation table, and today the company has lost two more senior executives.

The company’s vice-president and private label head Mausam Bhatt, and senior vice-president of engineering Peeyush Ranjan are the latest to quit the online shopping company. For those who don’t remember, this is on top of a series of senior execs leaving these past months – including product head Punit Soni, finance chief Sanjay Baweja, chief business officer Ankit Nagori, and legal head Rajinder Sharma.

See: Flipkart now worth just $6b, says Morgan Stanley

The India engineering team was reporting to engineering chief Ravi Garikipati for the past few months, while Peeyush was overseeing a company research centre in Palo Alto.

As technology head, Peeyush worked on features such as Flipkart Lite and in-app chat service Ping, along with product head Punit Soni. Flipkart canned Ping a few months ago, and Punit quit.

Earlier this year Flipkart hired Kalyan Krishnamurthy, who re-joined the team from Tiger Global earlier this year, to clean house, even as the VC was tightening its grip on Flipkart.

See: Flipkart has a new messiah, but the company needs to learn from history

Peeyush, who had joined the Bangalore-based company from Google, is going to join Airbnb, Mint reported today.

“A few months ago, I had to move to the US due to personal reasons. Around that time, we had set up a research lab in Palo Alto that I was overseeing – we’re doing some very cool things in the lab there. However, due to the personal reasons I spoke about, around that time it became clearer that I would have to spend a considerable time in the US, which is why I have decided to move on,” he told the paper in an interview.

It wasn’t immediately clear where Mausam, an old hand at Flipkart, was going.