Rohit Chadda
Rohit Chadda (born 26 August 1982) is an Indian investment banker and entrepreneur, who serves as the CEO of the digital business at Essel Group (Zee Entertainment, Zee Media and DNA). He was the co-founder of online food ordering platform Foodpanda. He is also the founder of omni-channel digital payments platform PayLo. He has been attributed for the turnaround of Zee Digital by bringing the digital business to the second position on ComScore from ninth position making Zee the second largest digital media group in India. He has been featured among Top Tech CEOs of the decade (2010-2020) in India and was featured among Fortune 40 under 40 in 2015. Education and early career Chadda graduated from Delhi Technological University (formerly Delhi College of Engineering) with a degree in computer engineering and worked as a software engineer for Computer Sciences Corporation. In 2007 he joined Indian Institute of Management Calcutta to do his MBA after which he worked at Merrill Lynch as an Investment Banker in United Kingdom. He took an internal transfer to India in 2011. Career Foodpanda Chadda began his career in 2012 when he co-founded foodpanda. foodpanda expanded to around 40 countries before being bought by Delivery Hero. Before foodpanda got popular, he joked that he delivered pizza for a living. foodpanda had raised a total investment of over US$300 million till 2015. Chadda in the middle of 2015 stepped down from day-to-day responsibilities at Foodpanda to launch his digital payments startup. Foodpanda was acquired by its global competitor Delivery Hero in 2016. Paylo In 2015, he launched a omni-channel digital payments platform PayLo which acquired the in-restaurant payments app Ruplee in March 2016 for an undisclosed sum. PayLo was successful in the wake of demonetisation in India and expanded pan-India before being acquired by Immortal Technologies. Chadda believes that execution is more important than the idea to make a startup successful and the key challenge for experienced professionals to work in a startup environment is to unlearn what they have previously learned. PayLo acquired Ruplee before being itself acquired by Immortal Technologies. Zee Group Chadda took over as CEO of digital publishing of Zee Group in May 2019. Since 2017, he had led global product and strategy for Zee Group launching ZEE5, the flagship OTT of Zee Entertainment, across 170+ countries. Since June 2019, Zee Digital, the online arm of the Zee group, has registered the highest growth year-on-year among the top media publishers in India. Times Internet Limited, Network 18 Group, and India Today Group have grown by 45%, 21%, and 22% respectively from June 2020 over June 2019 while Zee Digital witnessed a growth of 123% over the same period. Zee Digital achieved its first milestone in September 2019 by crossing 100 million unique monthly visitors and was ranked 6th in the news and information category on ComScore India rankings at the time. Later in the month of March 2020 it crossed 150 million unique monthly visitors mark moving to 4th position. Further in