Zomato, the latest in a series of departures by the Indian food delivery company that has seen its shares lose more than 57% in the past year, said the company’s founder and chief technology officer Gunjan Patidar has left the company.
Patidar is the fourth co-founder to leave the company. His departure follows the departure of another co-founder, Mohit Gupta, and two other senior executives last month.
“Patidar was one of Zomato’s first few employees and built core technology systems for the company. Over the past ten years, he has also nurtured a stellar technology leadership team to take on the mantle of leading technology operations into the future. His contribution to building Zomato has been invaluable,” the Indian food giant said in a stock exchange filing.
The exits come at a time when Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal, also a co-founder, tries to decentralize and share senior responsibilities with other executives. The company appointed four CEOs in August last year and rebranded its internal and wider organization as “Eternal”.
Zomato, which is backed by Ant Group, Temasek and Goldman Sachs, did not say why Patdar – or other top executives who were recently ousted – left.
In the year The company, which announced in mid-2021, reported a net loss of $30.4 million for the quarter ended in September last year.
“Fortunately, Zomato has no dearth of co-founders in the company. There is another executive, Akriti Chopra, who became a co-founder last year. […] Earlier this year, he was promoted to CEO as co-founder of Blinkit (which owns Zomato) to replace one of Blinkit’s co-founders who left last year.
“At this point, I’m starting to suspect that there’s someone in Zomato’s corporate management team whose full-time job they currently work with, constantly revising who’s who at which company.”
