Ola announces key appointments across various divisions amid a spree of exits

Mobility unicorn Ola has announced key appointments across various divisions after the company saw a spree of exits this year ahead of its $-1.2 billion IPO. Bengaluru headquartered startup said the key leadership appointments have been made across Ola Financial Services, Ola Cars, and Ola Electric. The appointments are a continuation of Ola's drive to attract the best global talent to realise its vision of New Mobility, which encompasses New Mobility Services, the company said in a statement.

The announcement comes on the heels of the exit of Ola's chief operating officer Gaurav Porwal, Chief Financial Officer Swayam Saurabh, Ola Electric co-founder Pranay Jivrajka. The company has also let go of its key employees in the communications, and general counsel teams, raising concerns on the functioning of the Softbank backed mobility leader.

With regards to the new appointments, Bhavish Aggarwal, Founder and CEO of Ola, said the company is ushering in the era of new mobility and continue to attract the best talent from around the world to build it out at scale. "These additions to our leadership team add significant experience and diverse skills to Ola in key areas, including lending, production and quality as well as engineering management, and I look forward to collaborating with them to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable mobility," the Ola chief added.

According to the company, PV Harinarayan joins as the Vice-President Lending, Ola Financial Services. Hari brings close to two decades of experience in the banking and fintech domain, having previously been the CEO of Simple Pay, where he was responsible for building a high-tech purpose-led digital lending NBFC. He has previously worked with organisations such as Bajaj Finserv, Barclays and ICICI Bank.

V Ramesh has been appointed as the V-P and head of operations at the Ola Futurefactory. He will be responsible for efficient operations and instilling best practices in safety, quality and productivity that will help the Futurefactory scale up into the world's largest and most advanced two-wheeler factory built on Industry 4.0 principles. Ramesh brings with him over three decades of experience in production, quality,  design and development, having previously worked at Toyota, Maruti Suzuki, Lucas TVS and TATA Hitachi.

Priteesh Mahajan has joined as the Head of Two-wheeler Product Planning and Program Management at Ola Electric. He will be responsible for overseeing the engineering program management for the company's two-wheeler programme, which includes both the current line-up, as well as future products. With a rich experience of over two decades, Priteesh was previously associated with ABB, where he managed global and local businesses as the Head of the Global Instrumentation business.

Ola said these senior appointments come close on the heels of other recent high-profile leadership announcements over the last several months, which includes Arun Sirdeshmukh, CEO, Ola Cars, and Vinay Bhopatkar as Head of Delivery business. In the last several months, Ola has made significant expansion of its leadership teams, which includes G R Arun Kumar as Group CFO, N Balachandar as CHRO, Rakesh Bhardwaj as Group CIO, Wayne Burgess as Ola Electric's Head of Design, Jose Pinheiro, Head of Global Manufacturing & Operations, Ola Electric and YS Kim as Ola Electric's Global Head of Sales and Distribution and Julien Geffard who heads Ola Electric's European operations.

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