Business-to-business unicorn Udaan on Monday said it has rejigged its organisational team and structure, amid transitions from a few senior executives.
The Lightspeed-backed company has decided to diversify its technology function into separate ‘product’ and ‘engineering’ functions, as its chief technology officer Gaurav Bhalotia steps down from his role.
Udaan also said it is merging its ‘essentials’ business, which includes fast moving consumer goods, staples, and pharma categories, with its discretionary business that involved general merchandise, lifestyle and electronics categories previously.
Vivek Gupta, who previously led the company’s essentials business, will step down from the position and take an advisory role with the board. The combined business units will be led solely by Uday Bhaskar, who was previously heading the discretionary division.
The development comes at a time when the Bengaluru-based company is reported to be in talks to raise fresh capital.
Similar to most other startups, Udaan let go of over 500 employees from its team in two rounds of layoffs last year as it prioritised profitability and efficiency amid a funding crunch.
“As we move forward in our journey, we are taking steps to further optimise synergies across businesses to be able to offer better value to our customers,” said Vaibhav Gupta, chief executive officer. He added that the company has witnessed ‘steady and durable’ progress in key performance indicators across all business verticals.
Founded in 2016 by former Flipkart employees Gupta, Amod Malviya and Sujeet Kumar, Udaan offers a platform for traders, wholesalers, retailers and manufacturers to come together, allowing them to find clients, suppliers and products across categories and interact with one another directly for the lowest price.
It counts Octahedron Capital, Moonstone Capital, DST Global, GGV Capital, Altimeter Capital and Tencent among others as its investors.
The company last raised $120 million (around Rs 960 crore) in convertible notes and debt, led by existing shareholders and bondholders in October last year.
Going forward, two of long-time employees Siddharth Reddy and Abhilash Pillai will lead engineering and product management for the customer platform respectively. Both will report to Vaibhav Gupta and join the executive management team.
Further, product management for supply chain will be with Pradeep Yadav, and Sanjeev Mehta will handle the domains of accounting & controls.
