Logistics company Ecom Express Pvt. Ltd. which counts alternative investment firms Partners Group and Warburg Pincus as its key shareholders, has appointed Ajay Chitkara as its new managing director and chief executive officer.
Chitkara, who resigned as director and CEO of Bharti Airtel Ltd's enterprise arm earlier this week and will leave the telecom operator in August, will assume responsibilities at Ecom Express from Sept. 1.
“Ajay has experience and a track record in scaling enterprise business and we look forward to his contributions as the company scales,” said TA Krishnan, Manju Dhawan and K. Satyanarayana, co-founders of Ecom Express.
With over 20 years of experience with Airtel, Chitkara also serves on the boards of Nxtra by Airtel, Hughes Communication and Network i2i. Prior to Airtel, Chitkara worked at Comsat Max Ltd in the sales vertical.
“It is great to be a part of this business and to be working with its customers, the team, the board and investors, with a common goal of creating a trusted logistics solutions provider for the e-commerce industry,” said Chitkara.
Founded in 2012, Ecom Express provides technology-enabled logistics services to the e-commerce industry. It claims to serve over 2,700 towns across India and has an employee count of 50,000 employees across 3,000 delivery centres.
In December 2020, Swiss private investment firm Partners Group acquired a substantial stake in Ecom from Warburg Pincus for $250 million, or about Rs 1,840 crore at the time. Warburg Pincus first invested in Ecom in 2015.
In 2021, the company raised $20 million in a follow-on investment round from British International Investment. The UK's development finance institution had earlier invested in Ecom in 2019.
