10 years after he co-founded Zomato, Pankaj Chaddah quits the food technology firm in what is the first of its kind instance of a founder leaving a startup in recent times.
While Chaddah gave no indication of his next move, he is expected to stay with the company until the end of March to enable a smooth transition. According to people aware of Chaddah’s plans, it seems likely that he will start up again.
“After 10 yrs, I am moving on from Zomato to try out something new. I’ll continue to play an active role till the end of this month,” Chaddah announced on micro-blogging site Twitter on Thursday evening.
Chaddah will retain his stake in the company which stands at about 3.11% and is worth about Rs237 crore post the latest funding by Ant Financial, as per data sourced by business data platform, Paper.vc.
Chaddah’s exit comes at a time when the Gurgaon-based firm has also seen a key shuffle in top management roles since January.
Mukund Kulashekaran has been elevated as the chief business officer from his earlier stint of the global business head of online ordering – the vertical that is at the center of the firm’s business line as it looks to overtake market leader Swiggy in that domain.
Apart from Kulashekaran, Gaurav Gupta has been appointed as the chief operating officer, elevating him from his earlier role of the global head for advertising sales.
Gupta will be in charge of critical operations including content and new initiatives such as their cloud kitchen module Zomato Infrastructure Services along with sourcing and reviews on the platform.
The reshuffle in the management, especially with the roles of the chief operating officer and chief business officer, were speculated to have been made due to Chaddah’s move away from a profit and loss accountability mandate, said a former senior executive declining to be named.
However, Chaddah’s role had been shifting since 2015 when he was handling the role of COO at the firm, setting the stage for his exit, according to the people cited above.
Over the last year, Chaddah has been the operational kickstarter for several new initiatives for Zomato having helmed Zomato Gold for the first couple of months during its launch as also stepping in to help the firm’s offline cloud kitchen model briefly, in the past.
The reshuffle is the latest in Zomato’s tryst with a spate of senior and mid-management exits over the last 2 years, including that of Deepak Gulati who resigned as COO within six months of joining and Samir Kuckreja who was brought in to scale the cloud-based point-of-sale system Zomato Base, both of which ET reported.
The key shift in management roles and mandates to spur growth across various business lines comes shortly after the Info Edge backed firm raised $200 million from Ant Financial, the payments affiliate of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, in a deal that valued Zomato at $1.1 billion.
Zomato, which saw online ordering form less than 20% of its overall top line in FY17, is expected to grow the business significantly to form almost half the revenue share in the long term. To that end, the firm has also been significantly ramping up the share of self-fulfilled deliveries for the business.
Story behind Zomato
The CEO and the Co-founder (Pankaj Chaddah & Deepinder Goyal) were working in Bain & Company, a consultancy firm and they had an hour as a lunch break. To go out search for a restaurant, decide what to eat and order and then get the order took most of their break time. So they decided to create a Database and collected the menu for the nearby restaurants and put their menus there.
Soon, people started using that widely and that is when things happened. They thought of a company and named it FoodieBay. This was in July 2008. This site, where they collected menus widely from many restaurants and uploaded on the site so that people could refer to it and just call the restaurant and place an order and till the time the breaks started, they could get the order. It was renamed as Zomato in November 2010. It now operates in 23 countries including Australia and the United States of America.