Krishna Motukuri Joins ibibo Following Rahul Sethi's Exit

Consumer Internet firm ibibo group has appointed Krishna Motukuri, as the new managing director of its e-commerce businesses. Rahul Sethi, the president of ibibo's e-commerce division recently quit to launch his own start-up.

At ibibo, Motukuri's role will be to build up two websites – online shopping portal Tradus.in and the hyper-local classifieds site TradusAds.in. "He has a lot of entrepreneurial and e-commerce experience which will enable us to further scale our current properties and develop new ones," said Ashish Kashyap, group CEO, ibibo Web. Ibibo is jointly owned by Naspers and Tencent and runs a social gaming platform as well as auto classifieds site Gaadi.com and Goibibo.com, a travel site.

Motukuri currently straddles multiple roles. He is an advisor to two innovative US-based Internet start-ups - Appitude makes reading more social while Live Complete is an online recommendation engine for finding deals and promotions online.

Motukuri also runs Mojo Station LLC, a software start-up he co-founded in August 2010 and is also an investor in BolTell Infomedia Pvt Ltd, a Bangalore-based start-up that develops audio guides, and is now also looking at e-commerce and technology services. BolTell has created guides for UNESCO world heritage sites and ASI monuments at Hampi, Badami, and Tanjavore and its customers include Mysore zoo, Bannerghatta zoo, and luxury trains.

Amazon Motukuri is better known as one of the key people behind the establishment of Amazon's Bangalore centre in 2004. He spent seven years at the top horizontal e-commerce firm, leading teams for search, co-op marketing, global expansion and supply chain in different stages. In March 2006, he quit Amazon while at the helm as Associate Director, to launch his own start-up called uGenie.

UGenie UGenie's flagship was weRead, a social book discovery engine that enables users to recommend and discover books, search for authors, rate and review books as well as share and network with other book lovers.

UGenie received $5 million in funding from BlueRun Ventures and Sierra Ventures in 2006 and was acquired by Lulu in August 2008. At Lulu, as the Senior Vice President of Business Development, Motukuri helped add strategic partnerships with Apple, McGraw Hill and Google.

Lulu has since been acquired by e-commerce portal Flipkart.com. Flipkart plans to use weRead to make buying books online more social by using the recommendation engine behind it.

Motukuri also was an advisor to Infibeam.com, another horizontal e-commerce site, between August 2009 and August 2010.