The Lightspeed Venture and Microsoft-backed unicorn did not name a successor to Bhalotia, instead saying that the technology vertical would be split into separate ‘product’ and ‘engineering’ functions.
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While Siddharth Reddy will lead the engineering team, Abhilash Pillai will head the product management function. Both will report to cofounder and chief executive Vaibhav Gupta, and join the executive management team.
Bhalotia, who worked at Oracle prior to Udaan, had also been vice president of engineering at Flipkart, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The company is also combining its ‘Essentials’ vertical, encompassing fast moving consumer goods (FMCG), staples, and pharmaceutical categories, with its ‘Discretionary’ vertical, which includes general merchandise, lifestyle and electronics categories.
The combined entity will be overseen by Uday Bhaskar, who currently heads the ‘Discretionary’ division. Vivek Gupta, who led ‘Essentials’, will cease to work in an operational capacity and become an advisor to the board, the firm said in a statement.
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“Vivek has been instrumental in helping us shape the business and organisational strategy for Essentials business, and we couldn’t have made the journey without his leadership, passion, customer centricity and capability centric thinking… Gaurav has, over the last two years, steered the Tech org evolution with rare calm and steadiness. He has contributed significantly towards helping us evolve the Tech organisation and build appropriate processes and systems to enable an effective technology function,” chief executive Vaibhav Gupta said.In 2022, Udaan saw the highest number of exits among senior executives across the tech and startup ecosystem, followed by mobility firm Ola and hospitality startup Oyo, according to data from executive talent search firm Longhouse Consulting.
Started by Amod Malviya, Vaibhav Gupta, and Sujeet Kumar, Udaan has raised over $350 million in debt and through convertible notes over the past year and a half, including $120 million in convertible notes and a debt round in October 2022. The firm had let go of 300-350 on-roll employees and a significant chunk of its contract workforce, for a total layoff count of over 1,000 people, in November 2022.
In fiscal year 2022, Udaan’s revenue from operations jumped 1.7 times to Rs 9,943.8 crore, but its net loss also widened to Rs 3,075.8 crore from Rs 2,503.3 crore earlier.