B2B e-commerce platform ElasticRun is onboarding three key hires who are veterans in the retail and FMCG space. Pankaj Roongta has joined as CFO, Sashi Gumma as CBO – Networks, and Dheeraj Arora joined as CBO – Supply, a senior executive of the newly minted unicorn told BusinessLine.
Roongta joins from Westlife Development Ltd (McDonalds), Gumma from More Retail and Arora from Unilever.
“Since our inception, we have not lost a single vice president, we have retained our entire leadership throughout the journey so far. That team has worked fantastically for us and brought us where we are today. But since we have to grow multi-folds from here onwards, we need to beef up our leadership team. This is the first time we went out in the market to hire top leadership. We hire people who have high conviction, are driven and ambitious. Then we provide them the right freedom and space to operate,” Sandeep Deshmukh, Co-founder and CEO, ElasticRun, told BusinessLine.
He added, “If you look at our core team, majority in our team are techies. We are analytical in thinking, finding a problem statement and then solving for that. But now, given the size of the business, it is a major need to get subject matter expertise in this area. Someone like Dheeraj comes with a deep knowledge of how FMCG industry operates. Now the onus is on us, to be able to absorb that knowledge Dheeraj, Sashi and Pankaj bring on the table and then marry it with our technology skillset.
Roongta joins from Westlife Development Ltd (McDonalds), where he held the position of Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for the Indian listed entity. He has over 20 years of leadership experience in the areas of finance, P&L, investor relations, M&A, corporate governance, and business transformation along with functional leadership experience in supply chain/logistics, legal and information technology. He has previously worked with L’Oreal as Finance Director for Asia Pacific based out of Hong Kong, as well as Johnson & Johnson and Abbot India as Financial Controller.
Gumma who has joined ElasticRun as CBO-Networks, was previously CEO -Supermarkets at More Retail where he was responsible for building the brand’s national footprint, improving their margins and driving business growth. He is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and IIM Ahmedabad, with over 22 years of experience in food and grocery-retail.
Arora has joined as the CBO for Supply. He will be responsible for the supply side growth of the ElasticRun platform. Arora is credited for building businesses and business solutions from scratch. He has over two decades of experience in blue chip CPG companies like Unilever and Britannia. He held key roles in Unilever across India and international markets, where his last role was Vice President, Modern Trade & eCom at HUL.
Expansion plans
Last month, the start-up announced that it has raised $330 million in a funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Goldman Sachs Asset Management at a unicorn valuation. Chimera and Innoven Capital along with long-term investor Prosus Ventures had also participated.
The newly-minted unicorn is planning to utilise the funding to expand rural networks to enable over a million kirana shops to access big consumer brands and food brands through its B2B e-commerce platform over the next 12 months.
Apart from the pan-India presence, the start-up is also planning to integrate expand its offerings of financial inclusion.
Deshmukh added, “We also have a strong data analytics platform which provides nuanced data on consumption in rural areas. We want to enrich that dataset and open it to a wider number of FMCG companies. That will be a big project for us.”
“Overall, we have close to 2,000 employees. We onboard higher number of partners rather than increasing the headcount. Our success will depend on the growth of our warehousing partner network on the ground and back-end data analytics. We are asset light on the ground,” he said.
ElasticRun was founded by Deshmukh, Shitiz Bansal and Saurabh Nigam in 2016. The company’s existing investors include Prosus Ventures (formerly Naspers Ventures), Kalaari Capital and Avataar Ventures.
Published on
March 02, 2022
