Swiggy’s CTO Dale Vaz Resigns, Madhusudan Rao to Take Over from May
- ByStartupStory | April 3, 2023
Swiggy‘s CTO, Dale Vaz, has resigned, effective from May this year, from the food and grocery delivery platform. This announcement follows the news that Karthik Gurumurthy, head of Instamart, Swiggy’s quick-commerce vertical, would be taking a sabbatical by the end of this month. Madhusudan Rao, Swiggy’s senior vice-president of consumertech and fintech (engineering and product), is set to replace Dale Vaz as the company’s chief technology officer, effective from May this year. Vaz, who came to Swiggy from Amazon in 2018, is reportedly leaving to start his own entrepreneurial venture.
According to a statement by a Swiggy spokesperson, Dale Vaz has decided to pursue his own entrepreneurial venture and will be stepping down from his role as Swiggy’s chief technology officer in May 2023. The spokesperson also mentioned that Vaz will continue in his position until May and will then serve in an advisory role for an extended period. The company expressed its gratitude for Vaz’s contributions to Swiggy.
According to a statement by a Swiggy spokesperson, Madhusudan Rao will be the new CTO, taking over from Dale Vaz who has decided to move on from the company to start his own entrepreneurial venture. Vaz will continue in his current role until May 2023 and will serve in an advisory capacity for a longer period. Vaz had initially joined Swiggy as head of engineering and data science, but was promoted to the CTO role in 2020 after the departure of co-founder Rahul Jaimini. The spokesperson highlighted that Rao, who has been with Swiggy for over four years, has extensive experience in tech leadership and a successful track record of meeting customer needs.
According to a report by ET, Karthik Gurumurthy is expected to lead a new business in the wider ecommerce space at Swiggy, known internally as Instamart Max, following his sabbatical. This development comes as Swiggy is competing with Zomato for the largest slice of the food and grocery delivery market. Swiggy’s Instamart has undergone top leadership changes amid new challenges, with Zomato’s loyalty program, Zomato Gold, regaining market share it had lost to Swiggy in the second half of 2022, according to a research note by HSBC.
According to a report by brokerage firm Jefferies, Instamart is falling behind Zomato’s grocery delivery service, Blinkit. Swiggy had to lay off 380 employees on January 20 due to a slowdown in its core food delivery business. CEO Sriharsha Majety announced in an internal memo that the company would also be shutting down its meat delivery business. Despite the closure of its meat delivery service, Swiggy is focusing on grocery ecommerce, which now includes three separate businesses: Instamart, Handpicked, and Insanely Good.
According to sources, Swiggy has launched two new businesses, Handpicked and Insanely Good, that sell premium groceries including gourmet offerings. The company has also launched a direct-to-consumer ecommerce marketplace called Minis. It is reported that all these newer businesses share a common back-end operations and technology setup to procure goods. In December 2022, Swiggy launched a pilot of Handpicked in Bengaluru.
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