Udaan makes organisational changes in business and tech verticals

Udaan, the business-to-business e-commerce firm, has announced organisational changes as two of its senior executives, including Chief Technology Officer Gaurav Bhalotia, prepare to step away from day-to-day operations.

The firm announced organisational changes encompassing both its business units (BUs) – essentials and discretionary business – and the technology function. As part of this organisational change, the essentials business, encompassing FMCG, staples, and pharma categories, will be consolidated with the discretionary business. This includes general merchandise, lifestyle, and electronics categories. This unified business unit will be led by Uday Bhaskar, who currently heads the discretionary business division. The integration of these two business units serves the twin objectives of "synergy in operations" and building "excellence in commercial capabilities".

Uday Bhaskar brings with him over 26 years of experience in leadership positions across India, the UK, and Asia. Prior to joining Udaan, Bhaskar served as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of D-Mart stores. Before that, he held several high-ranking sales leadership roles at Procter & Gamble.

Vivek Gupta, who led the essentials business, will transition from the operating role. He will be engaged with Udaan as an Advisor to the Board.

"Over the past two years, Udaan has achieved consistent progress on its growth and sustainability agenda, with four consecutive quarters of growth and improving profitability," said the company. "This was driven by focused interventions on strategy and the business model. With this evolution of the business model, Udaan continues to evolve organisation design that reinforces and enables growth and furthers the 'efficiency with excellence' agenda."

Udaan is also reorganising its technology function into separate "product" and "engineering" functions. Siddharth Reddy will lead engineering, and Abhilash Pillai will lead product management for the customer platform for Udaan. Both will report to Vaibhav Gupta and join the executive management team. Product management for the supply chain will be with Pradeep Yadav, and for the accounting and controls domain will be with Sanjeev Mehta. Pradeep and Sanjeev are already part of the Executive Management team.

Gaurav Bhalotia, who led the technology function, will transition from the company.

The Executive Management team will now comprise Vaibhav Gupta (Co-founder & CEO), Aditya Pande (Group CFO), Meenakshi Priyam (Group CHRO), Uday Bhaskar (Head-Essentials & Discretionary Business), Sanjeev Mehta (Head-eCommerce Centre of Excellence and Product Management), Chaitanya Adapa (Head-Udaan Capital), Pradeep Yadav (Head-Supply Chain), Lokesh Rajpal (Group General Counsel), Siddharth Reddy (Head-Engineering), Abhilash Pillai (Head-Product Management, Customer Platform), Vignesh Ramachandran (Head-HORECA and Fresh Business), and Vishnu Menon (Head-Strategy, IR and Corporate Development).