Cloud telephony startup Exotel strengthens top deck

Bangalore-based cloud telephony firm Exotel Techcom Pvt. Ltd has appointed Ananda Kumar as chief finance and strategy officer and Rashmme Eshwar as head - people operation.

Kumar will oversee expansion and growth strategies while Eshwar will take care of talent acquisition and employee management, the firm said in a statement.

"They bring together close to 25 years of experience and that would help us in achieve growth and expansion," said Shivakumar Ganesan, CEO, Exotel Techcom.

A BITS Pilani and IIM Bangalore alumnus with close to 10 years of experience in consulting and technology, Kumar previously served management consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal. In his earlier stints, he worked with Diageo and Yahoo.

"I am excited to be part of the team that is building an innovative communications platform. Businesses are successful only when value is created for all stakeholders," said Kumar.

An MBA from Birla Institute of Management, Eshwar has 14 years of experience in the human resources vertical and previously worked with Bangalore-based cloud storage firm Coho Data. Earlier, she also worked with Citrix and SAP labs.

Exotel was founded in 2011 by Shivakumar Ganesan, Ishwar Sridharan, Siddharth Ramesh and Vijay Sharma. In 2014, Sharma quit the firm.

BITS Pilani alumnus Ganeshan, who is also Exotel's CEO, had earlier launched Roopit, a real-time micro classifieds platform integrated with voice and SMS. Before becoming an entrepreneur, he had worked with Yahoo and Flipkart.

Exotel enables companies to manage customers on inbound voice calls and text messages without setting up a full-fledged call centre. It counts Flipkart, Uber, Ola and redBus among its customers.

The firm has made a couple of acquisitions recently. In November last, it had acquired Voyce, a platform that allows businesses to gather customer feedback.

In February last year, it acquired voice-based social media startup Croak.it.

Like this report? Sign up for our daily newsletter to get our top reports.