Shadowfax gets Industry Senior Shamik Sharma as Independent Board Director

Shadowfax, India’s leading logistics player has announced the appointment of Shamik Sharma as an Independent Board Director, another strategic hiring in quick succession. With this announcement, the company aims to bring in a strong technical and business mentorship as it pursues its fast growth trajectory. The company aims to focus on consistency, quality control, business planning along with financial acumen for overall robust growth in the long run.

Shamik brings many years of solid experience building technology-driven business in the Silicon Valley as well as in India. He was a successful tech entrepreneur in the Bay area, and also held senior roles at HP, Yahoo, RockYou&Lytro.

Recently, as part of the leadership team at Myntra, he built and managed the product, engineering, UX and data-science teams. His deep business insights come from building strong teams and leading companies through different phases - including rapid growth, difficult economic times, periods of aggressive competition and successful exits.

Shamik will be advising Shadowfax as an independent Board director for its extensive logistics business.

"Last-mile logistics is a core pillar of the new economy. Shadowfax is building a very important service which matches delivery partners with customer needs in real-time using technology. I am very excited to work with the really innovative team at Shadowfax to take the business to the next level”, said Shamik Sharma on his appointment as an Independent Director.

“It’s been amazing to bring Shamik on board who has aunique mix of large technical and business experience. We look forward to leverage his in-depth knowledge and expertise to help Shadowfax achieve the desired growth in a longer run” said Abhishek Bansal, Co-Founder &CEO, Shadowfax.

The company has multiplied its capabilities three-times, since its inception and has projected a 150% year-on-year growth for the next five years. Shadowfax has recently made two other strategic hires to its leadership team, as reported earlier.

Headquartered in Bangalore, Shadowfax id a brainchild of two IIT Delhi alumni, started in 2015 with an aim to make instant deliveries a reality in India. Its logistics gateway for businesses, operating on a plug-and-play the format offers an on-demand delivery service platform to its clients. The technology enables customers to make fast, safe and reliable deliveries by instantly connecting them (businesses/e-tailers /retailers) with the company’s extensive network of 50000+ Delivery Partners spread across 150+ cities and towns in India. Operating on an asset-light model, Shadowfax currently fulfills 1.5 lakhs unique orders a day in food, grocery, fashion, pharmacy, furniture, e-commerce, and traditional business sectors. Shadowfax's strong technology the platform is integrated with most new age e-commerce ventures like Flipkart, Amazon, Swiggy, Big Basket and many others including smaller restaurants, merchants and retailers. Shadowfax is on a mission to connect the next million micro entrepreneurs and suppliers in logistics using a singular platform/IOT to bridge the information gap and eradicate the inefficiencies across the value chain. Its vision is to become the partner of first choice for all businesses through a plug and play platform for instant delivery services.

HR Tech Startup 'Hush' Raises ₹4.5 Cr from Accel and Shamik Sharma

Bangalore-based Hush, an employee-focused HR tech firm founded by two former Yahoo employees, has raised ₹ 4.5 crores (~ US$ 641,000) in a fresh round of funding on the back of an unexpected growth in user acceptance of their platform. Emerging as the go-to workplace app for employees from over 300 companies, Hush has also gained a higher number of employees within each company ‘cohorts’. Existing investors, Accel, Shamik Sharma (Business Head at Curefit), and an angel investor participated in the round.

Additionally, the company has added Nikhil Raj, Co-Founder of Paysa.com, to their advisory board.

The new round of funds will be utilised to expand the Hush team, grow the platform’s user base, and most importantly, launch new features on the app.

Founded in September 2017, by Ashutosh Dabral and Umesh Joshi [L-R in above picture], Hush is an employee-focused HR tech firm that provides a voice to employees and helps them move to the next level in their career. The platform also allows verified employees to rate their CEOs and CXOs. Employees of startups such as Flipkart, Ola and Practo and larger firms like Accenture, Adobe, IBM, TCS, and Infosys use Hush to get answers to their workplace and career related queries.

Before founding Hush, both of its co-founders Dabral and Joshi, had earlier worked together at Yahoo for 2.5 years and later launched their first venture together in 2016 with expertise in product management and building cutting-edge technology for consumer tech products. The duo have expertise in product management and building cutting-edge technology for consumer tech products.

The fresh raise will strengthen the brand’s growth narrative and help them reach out to a wider audience through the introduction of cutting-edge technology. Ranging from career advice to various internal discussions, the platform has seen a wide range of use cases over the course of time. With the inclusion of new-age tech, Hush looks to create more features for employees to have access to.

At present, a user spends an average of 10 minutes per day on the app. Moving forward, Hush predicts the platform will onboard an additional 1000 companies within a year. The company has also observed an uptick in the usage of their platform’s newly-launched modules ‘Salary Data’ and ‘Career Advice.’

“One of our key responsibilities at Hush is to deliver authentic data to employees about various organisations so as to help them take better career decisions. The app is also helping employees voice their opinions anonymously about issues that they are facing in corporates, which provides valuable insights to employers and helps them take important business decisions,” Ashutosh Dabral, Co-Founder of Hush commented.

Dabral added, “We are extremely thrilled to have received support from Accel as it adds a lot of credibility to our existing business model. Excited with the increased demand from our consumers, our fresh raise is focused on expanding our technology to include a wider range of audiences with more use cases. The expanded capital base will also help us build better features, expand the team, and develop the platform’s user base.”

Hush began as a workplace discussion app for employees in September 2017. Now, it is on the path to become a platform that can be a companion throughout an employee’s career and help them move to the next level. In October 2018, they launched their new website https://hush.company/ that aims to be an authentic source of information about a company, including details such as salary levels, data culture descriptions.

Hush entered the market to tackle the growing need for employees to express their real opinions, discuss pressing concerns, and pose difficult questions on topics that are important to them on a common platform. As a lot of discussions on the platform were about salary levels and career growth, Hush launched the new modules on their website to better address user needs. The Hush platform now has communities from 300+ companies and reliable salary data for 700+ companies sourced from employees, HR professionals, and recruitment consultants. The company is also building a large scale machine learning model to predict salary levels and help people evaluate what salary they will be able to get based on their skill levels. It also provides career advice to employees via a network of experts.

Over the years, leading venture capitalists have invested over INR 1000 crore in the promising HR-tech startups, which have gained considerable momentum with the active role of investors in the space.

In March this year, Gurgaon based HR Technology startup Benepik had raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from a group of investors.

In November last year, Mumbai-based HR tech startup Shortlist raised $1 million in seed funding from US-based venture capital firm University Ventures, ImpactAssets, Bodley Group, Kenya-based seed fund Zephyr Acorn, Samir Shah of Sattva Capital and several other investors from both India and the US.

pi Ventures Ropes In Shamik Sharma As Venture Partner

Applied artificial intelligence, machine learning and IoT focused early stage venture fund, pi Ventures has appointed Shamik as a Venture Partner. He was previously the Chief Product and Technology officer at Myntra where he was responsible for driving technology strategy and culture. At pi Ventures, Sharma will work with portfolio founders to help them get past critical hurdles, design their product roadmaps and hire specialised talent. His role will involve supporting pi Ventures in deep understanding of technology and IP via technology deep dives of prospective portfolio companies and support in bringing interesting startups aligned with pi Ventures’ investment theme to their deal pipeline.

Commenting on the development, Manish Singhal, Founding Partner, pi Ventures said, “With two decades of rich experience and business wisdom, Sharma is a great addition to the pi team. His unique mix of deep and broad technical expertise, product design, and business experience will play a key role in enriching our investment decisions as well as a welcome help for our founders”.

Sharma brings immense value with his experience of being an angel investor and technology advisor for several Indian startups. With his capability of understanding roadblocks from the technology perspective he will mentor and enable the startups to reach their goal at a faster pace. Shamik’s experience of recruiting talent to build big teams at large companies as well as startups in short periods will benefit pi Ventures and their portfolio as they plan to invest in 18-20 startups over the next 3-4 years.

" We hope our focus on deep technology-based opportunities will help create many disruptive products and businesses out of India,” said Sharma.

Sharma has held key roles in several organizations and has over 17 years of technology experience. Shamik has spent most of his career in the bay area and was the Vice President, Software at Lytro, a light field camera startup company founded in 2006. Prior to that, he has also held executive roles in RockYou, StumbleUpon and Yahoo! Shamik is a Computer Science graduate from IIT-Kharagpur and holds a Master’s degree from the University of Maryland.

pi Ventures was founded by Manish Singhal (ex. Co-founder & CEO, LetsVenture and prominent angel investor) and Umakant Soni (Ex. Director India, Science Inc & Co-founder AI BOT company, 2010). The fund focuses on healthcare, logistics, retail, fintech and enterprise sectors. Backed by some of the leading entrepreneurs globally, pi Ventures brings hands-on product and entrepreneurial experience to the India venture investing ecosystem.