Paytm makes high-profile appointments to spearhead growth

In order to go head-to-head with the top players of online retail in India, the country’s fastest growing mCommerce website Paytm, which started in 2010, has appointed Ruchi Sanghvi, the first woman engineer at Facebook, WhatsApp global business head Neeraj Arora and InMobi founder Naveen Tewari to its board.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and CEO of Paytm, told The Economic Times, "We are a young company and need help in scaling Paytm to become India's most dominant mobile Interncompany."

Sharma further added, "Ruchi brings a great tech and product background, Neeraj is one of the best-connected Silicon Valley Indians and Naveen knows how to build a world-class organisation from India."

Apart from Sharma and these latest appointments, Noida-based Paytm board includes Ravi Adusumalli, Vivek Mathur of Saif Partners, Das of Sapphire Ventures, Kunal Bajaj of Analysys Mason and venture investor Michael Levinthal.

In February, Paytm raised $575 million (Rs 3,600 crore) from Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba's affiliate Ant Financial Services Group at an estimated valuation of over $1.5 billion, and now it's looking to compete with the India’s top e-tailers like Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon in a fierce battle for talent as well as market share in the country.

"We look to bring global talent and best practices for scaling to half-a-billion Indians on the Paytm platform. I can see our very strong independent board helping us achieve that," said Sharma.

By 2020, the Indian Internet market is expected to grow to $137 billion as against $11 billion in 2013.
(Image: Paytm)