In a bid to strengthen its position in the field of online retailing and to win our the top players, PayTM has made three new high-profile appointments at Exec level today, which includes that of Ruchi Sanghvi, Neeraj Arora and Naveen Tiwari to its board.
Ruchi Sanghvi, is popularly known for being the first woman engineer at Facebook while Neeraj Arora was former global business head of WhatsApp. Naveen Tiwari is the founder of InMobi.
Neeraj Arora joined WhatsApp in 2011 to manage business side of the IM app for its global expansion. Prior to that, he worked for Google. Naveen Tiwari founded InMobi, a mobile ad tech platform with a focus on making advertising compelling.
Ruchi Sanghvi managed the News Feed feature on Facebook along with Facebook Connect and Facebook’s Developer Conference F8. She has also led core areas of product including Facebook Privacy, Notes, Homepage, Profiles, and User Engagement.
Speaking on these new appointments, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder and CEO of PayTM tells us,
As a young company, we are pleased to have such stalwarts in our team to help us scale the brand. Ruchi, Neeraj and Naveen all come with tremendous Internet commerce experience with highly renowned brands. We look forward to the strategic contribution they will make towards Paytm’s exciting journey ahead.
Their contribution will help in scaling Paytm to become India’s most dominant mobile Internet Company. We look to bring global talent and best practices for scaling to half-a-billion Indians on the Paytm platform. I can see our very strong independent board helping us achieve that.
Apart from these three new appointment, the member of board includes Ravi Adusumalli, Vivek Mathur (SAIF Partners), Jai Das (Sapphire Ventures), Kunal Bajaj (Analysys Mason) and Michael Levinthal.
Founded in 2010 by Vijay Shekhar Sharma, PayTM is looking to win the eCommerce battle in India by competing against the top three players in the field – Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon. While PayTM started of as a recharging platform, it quickly diversified into e-commerce and cashless payment divisions. PayTM wallet is already a huge success in the country, with brands like Uber tying up to do away with the hassles of cash-based transactions.
Despite the glutted Indian e-commerce market, PayTM has had decent successs in the field. In February this year, the company raised $575 million from Ant Financial Services Group, an Alibaba subsidiary, at a valuation of $1.5 billion. PayTM, by transaction numbers, is the largest mobile commerce platform in India with the company claiming to achieve more than 60 million orders every month.
