Rao will, however, continue to “work with the Board to help identify the right CEO to lead this mission. He will also continue to work with and advise the board with respect to the new leadership,” the company said in a statement.
The statement did not give any details of the next chief executive.
Rao was among the founders of the startup, along with Sourjyendu Medda, Sankar Bora, and Rajat Shikhar. All the three other co-founders still remain at the firm in different capacities. Rao had founded another ecommerce platform before Dealshare, and worked at Microsoft prior to that, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Dealshare, backed by Tiger Global, Matrix Partners, and Alpha Wave Global, had laid off around 100 employees, or over 6% of its then 1,500-strong workforce, in January. The move was linked to its business plan for the next financial year with a focus on profitability, founder Sourjyendu Medda had told ET at the time.
The Bengaluru-based firm, which had expanded to about 150 cities and towns last year, has now paused operations in about a fifth of them. It has been repositioning itself as a direct-to-consumer ecommerce firm, offering a range of products to low-income consumers. It sells grocery and other essentials along with general merchandise and some fashion items.
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The firm also supplies goods to kirana (corner) stores along with building a B2B2C model whereby customers can buy goods they find online at a nearby offline kirana store that the company has partnered with. The firm became a unicorn in January last year after closing a $165-million funding round from Tiger Global, Alpha Wave and others.