Vserv ropes in Anurag Patnaik from Reliance Jio as senior VP for product

Mumbai-based mobile ad exchange Vserv.mobi has appointed Anurag Patnaik as its senior vice president (VP) for product. Patnaik joins Vserv from Reliance Jio Infocomm, where he served as senior VP and headed the company's advertising business.

Patnaik comes with over 17 years of experience across digital advertising, mobile, media and Big Data. Prior to Reliance Jio, he was VP (product management, social media and advertising) at NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey Company. Earlier, he was director and business head (advertising and analytics) at Openwave Inc. He had also worked at companies including Yahoo Inc., Walt Disney, Quovera Inc. and MicroStrategy in the past.

He holds a MBA degree from University of Pennsylvania and a MS degree from Cornell University.

"Patnaik's unique global experience in dealing with digital products combined with our expertise will accelerate our scalability to make us stay ahead of the curve," said Dippak Khurana, co-founder and CEO of Vserv.

Recently, Vserv's global marketing and product head Binay Tiwari had left the company.

Founded in January 2010 by Khurana and Ashay Padwal, Vserv claimed that it was receiving 2.4 billion ad requests on a daily basis as of March 31, 2014. In its global territory, India is the biggest market with 27 per cent share, followed by Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. The company has offices in the US, the UK, South Africa, Dubai, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines and Vietnam, besides Mumbai in India.

The firm recently launched 'search intent ads' to enable marketers to bag customers via in-ad search, besides a real time bidding platform on its mobile ad exchange. Previously, it also started enabling advertisers to reward consumers with mobile recharges for engaging with brands. The company is backed by IDG Ventures and Epiphany Ventures.