Snapdeal CTO Amitabh Misra quits the company

Amitabh Misra, chief technology officer (CTO) and senior VP- engineering at e-commerce major Snapdeal.com, has quit the company.

"Misra has been a valuable member of our team and has played a key role in helping Snapdeal build a strong technology platform till now. He has decided to pursue other interests now and we wish him all the best for the same," a Snapdeal spokesperson told Techcircle.in.

The development was first reported by The Economic Times. While details on Misra's next move are not available as of now, the report mentions that he is likely to go down the entrepreneurial path.

A B.Tech from IIT Kanpur and an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley, US, Misra had been spearheading the engineering division of Snapdeal.com since November 2011. He has over 18 years of experience and prior to Snapdeal, he was senior engineering manager at CashEdge, a provider of intelligent money movement services. He had earlier also worked at companies like VeriSign, Wells Fargo, ProactiveNet, Inc., US West Communications, and Infosys Ltd.

The development comes a day after Techcircle.in reported that Snapdeal had appointed Jeyandran Venugopal as a technology advisor. Venugopal will be associated with Snapdeal in an advisory capacity and he will work with the leadership team to lay down the company's technology roadmap.

In December last year, the company had appointed Vishal Chadha as vice president for market development.

Founded in 2010, Snapdeal was started as an online deals site, which later pivoted to a full-fledged horizontal e-commerce company with a marketplace model in September 2011. It claims to have 5 million-plus products across more than 500 diverse categories from thousands of regional, national, and international brands and retailers. Run by Delhi-based Jasper Infotech Pvt Ltd, Snapdeal has now become one of the fastest growing and among the top three online marketplaces in India, with more than 100,000 vendors.

In October last year, Japanese telecom and internet firm SoftBank Corp (which is the single largest shareholder of Alibaba) committed $627 million (Rs 3,846 crore) in Snapdeal. Its other investors include eBay, Kalaari Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Ratan Tata, BlackRock, Temasek, Myriad Asset Management, Tybourne Capital, PremjiInvest and Saama Capital.

Earlier this month, Techcircle.in had exclusively reported that the company is also in talks with new investors, including international hedge funds, to raise $400 million in a fresh round of funding.

Snapdeal has a 1,000 people strong technology team.