Ex-Facebook tech lead Prashant Malik joins social commerce firm LimeRoad as CTO

LimeRoad.com, a social commerce platform for women to discover, share and shop lifestyle products, has appointed ex-Facebook tech lead Prashant Malik as its CTO.

Suchi Mukherjee, co-founder and CEO, LimeRoad, said, "We are happy that Prashant is joining us on the core founding team. He will be responsible for the scalable distributed systems that will lie at the heart of our back-end, as well as the visualisation and discovery of the merchandise that the back-end will enable on to our front-end, as well as on social platforms."

Prior to LimeRoad, Malik had a four-year stint with Facebook where he held positions of engineering manager and technical leader. Previously, he had also worked at companies such as Microsoft and Siemens Public Communication Software Ltd. He holds a B.Tech degree in computer science and engineering from IIT, Delhi.

"South East Asia is the manufacturing hub of the world and presents a great opportunity to build technology that enables a deeply social platform for user engagement, visualisation of the merchandise and creating a managed marketplace.The team at LimeRoad has the right mix of experience to crack this and we are looking forward to to realise this vision," said Malik.

Owned and operated by Gurgaon-based AM Marketplaces Pvt Ltd, the portal allows shoppers to buy by city, brand or flagship store. One can also browse and connect with shops, brands and retailers and unlike traditional e-commerce portals, LimeRoad sports the look and feel of a magazine where shoppers can actually flip the pages to view the featured products. The startup was set up by Mukherjee, who had earlier worked with the executive management team of Skype, along with Manish Saksena, former COO of Tommy Hilfiger India, and Ankush Mehra, former head of supply chain at Reliance Hypermarkets.

In October last year, Matrix Partners India and Lightspeed Venture Partners had co-led a $5 million round of funding in the startup.