Ola’s high-profile CFO quits

A quick Ola ride. Photo credit: Michael Coghlan.

India’s largest ride-hailing app just lost its chief financial officer. Ola’s CFO Rajiv Bansal, who had jumped ship from IT behemoth Infosys to join the taxi-hailing company in October, 2015, quit today. The company’s operations head Pallav Singh has moved up as its interim CFO.

The news was confirmed to Tech in Asia by two highly placed sources within Ola.

Rajiv was a high profile hire for Ola in the wake of US$500 million series F round of funding in 2015. He was one of the highest paid executives at Infosys, which he quit as CFO.

Much water has flowed under the bridge since then. Both Ola and India’s ecommerce leaders Flipkart and Snapdeal cut a sorry figure last year, even as their global rivals Uber and Amazon surged in India with superior tech and customer engagement backed with huge funds.

Rajiv Bansal talking about Ola in March 2016. Screengrab from ET Now video.

Uber shifted focus to India after pulling out of China, and so did Amazon which has remained a fringe player in China. It’s going to get even harder for the Indian players with Alibaba preparing to enter the fray directly this year.

See: Pros and cons for Alibaba in battle with Amazon on neutral ground in India

Ola and Snapdeal, both backed by Japan’s SoftBank, struggled to raise funds. Flipkart had a similar fate, seeing its valuation plummet. All three of India’s startup icons are seeing an exodus of top management talent. Snapdeal’s two senior executives – Abhishek Kumar, who was the head of corporate development and responsible for fundraising, and Sandeep Komaravelly, senior vice-president for Snapdeal’s mobile customer-to-customer marketplace Shopo, – quit recently.

Last month, US-based investment firm Vanguard Group slashed the valuation of its stake in Ola by over 40 percent.

The story will be updated as we get more details.

With reporting inputs from Nivedita Bhattacharjee.