Mobile media startup Affle makes key appointments to strengthen India biz team

Affle, a Singapore-headquartered mobile media startup, has appointed Vikas Katoch as national sales head and Prashant Kripps as head, publisher development and management, for its soon-to-be-launched new digital business unit in India.

Katoch and Kripps were previously with Komli Media as national sales head for video advertising and national head for publisher groups, respectively.

Katoch has 12 years of experience in digital sales and marketing. He has also worked with Jivox, an interactive video advertising platform, Hungama, a digital marketing company,  IT Nation, an online intermediary which provides information for enterprises, technology resellers and general consumers and Asian Paints. Kripps, with an experience of over 12 years across television, print, OOH and digital media, has worked for Times Innovative Media Ltd, HT Media, Media2Win, GroupM and Mindshare, a media investment agency.

Affle also promoted Gaurav Pahwa as national sales head,  mobile. Gaurav joined Affle last year from Network 18 and has managed to drive Affle's mobile advertising sales effort.

Sankalp Mehrotra, regional Director, business development, Affle, said, "Given their robust experience in the digital industry, we look forward to exciting times ahead and achieving continued success. Over the last few months we have made a lot of key appointments in Affle, and with a team like this we believe we are well geared to achieve very significant business growth this year."

In March, Affle had appointed Siddarth Correya and Lochan Kothari as the director for business development  Indonesia and associate director for business development for India, respectively. Before that, it hired Rahul Roushan as head, content services.  Rahul previously ran the news satire website Faking News.

Last October, Affle raised over Rs 50 crore in its second round of funding from existing investor D2 Communications Inc., a joint venture between Japanese telco NTT DoCoMo Inc. and ad agency Dentsu. Till now, Affle has raised a total of $20 million in funding from various investors including a previous round of $5 million from Microsoft in 2008.