Dhingana appoints Rohit Bhatia as new CEO

Social music streaming site Dhingana has appointed Rohit Bhatia as its new chief executive officer while Snehal Shinde, co-founder and former CEO, has now become the CTO of the company.

Bhatia has over 30 years of experience and prior to Dhingana, he was leading business development (for cloud computing solutions) and driving sales (for mobile commerce and multimedia solutions) at Ericsson. He had also worked with Bharti Airtel, ACL Wireless, SmartTrust AB and Seamless (where he was CEO). He holds a BE in Electronics & Telecommunication from Rani Durgavati Vishwavidyalaya in Jabalpur.

"Rohit's extensive understanding of sales, marketing and business development makes him an ideal fit to lead our team," said Shinde.

Last year, Dhingana also appointed  Ashish Joshi, the former head of digital and business development (India & SAARC) at Universal Music India, as its vice-president (business development).

Dhingana was set up in February 2007 by twin brothers, Snehal and Swapnil Shinde. It currently features a collection of over 5 lakh free songs in 35 genres, available across different platforms (iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Symbian) and devices. It claims to be the largest on-demand Bollywood and Indian music streaming service across the globe with 15 million active visitors a month. Headquartered in California, the company also has an office in Pune.

The company had earlier (October 2012) raised $7 million in Series B round of funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Existing investors Inventus Capital Partners and Helion Venture Partners also participated in that round. As part of the deal, Dev Khare from Lightspeed joined the Dhingana board. Back in 2011, it had also raised an undisclosed amount from Inventus Capital Partners and Helion Venture Partners.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)