SMS GupShup Appoints Two Senior Execs For Marketing & HR

Mumbai-based Webaroo that runs mobile group messaging service SMS GupShup has appointed Ravi Sundararajan as vice-president of marketing and Samir Parekh as vice-president of human resources. The company has also opened five new offices across India to get more demand from its advertiser and user base.

In his new role, Sundararajan will handle the company's product, solution, channel and consumer marketing, branding, corporate communications & operations. Before moving to SMS GupShup, he was founder & CEO of cloud services start-up focused on next generation ecommerce and web media analytics for mobile, social, online retail and media & entertainment web properties. He has previously worked at Symantec, Akamai, Handspring and McKinsey among other firms.

Parekh, who was a full time trainer at Kotak Life Insurance, will be responsible for growing and retaining the ace team at SMS GupShup.

They both have decades of marketing, sales and human resource experience and also expertise in product management & training.

"We have some of the best talent in the industry. Adding Ravi and Samir takes that to the next level and help us achieve our vision for everyone to be able to 'GupShup' which means 'chit chat' in Hindi on any mobile phone even if they're hundreds or thousands of miles away from each other. With these new hires, 'GupShup' is well on the road to becoming as common a word in English as yoga or kama sutra," said Beerud Sheth, co-founder and CEO of Webaroo.

Headquartered in Mumbai, Webaroo is also planning to open seven new offices in Kochi, Hyderabad, Bhubaneswar, Ahmedabad, and Jaipur. Recently the company had raised $10 million (Rs 49 crore) in the series E round of fundraising from venture capital investors. It has over 50 million users for both Twitter and Facebook in India and also doubled its in-house staff from 100 employees in 2010 to 200 this year.