India’s Zomato on Monday said its chief technology officer and co-founder Gunjan Patidar has stepped down after 10 years of serving at the food delivery platform.
“Gunjan Patidar was one of the first few employees of Zomato and built the core tech systems for the company. Over the last 10-plus years, he also nurtured a stellar tech leadership team that is capable of taking on the mantle of leading the tech function going forward. His contribution to building Zomato has been invaluable,” Zomato said in its regulatory filing.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Patidar graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology and joined Zomato in 2008. His plans after resigning from Zomato were not immediately clear.
Zomato has been witnessing a series of high-profile exits lately. In October, in the third high-profile exit, co-founder Mohit Gupta resigned after a four-and-half-year stint. His departure closely followed the resignations of Rahul Ganjoo, Zomato’s new initiatives head and former food delivery chief, and Siddharth Jhawar, the head of its Intercity Legends service.
Last month, Temasek Holdings bought a 1.14% stake in Zomato, a day after Alipay Singapore Holding Pte offloaded 3.07% of its shares in the food delivery startup, according to data from the National Stock Exchange.
Camas Investments Pte Ltd, an arm of Singapore’s state-owned fund Temasek Holdings, bought 98 million shares of Zomato on Wednesday at Rs 62 apiece for over $74 million. Following the deal, Temasek’s stake in the company will increase to 4%.
In August, Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital India also divested parts of their pre-IPO shares in the Indian food delivery startup.
Food delivery platforms in India are increasingly jostling for space. For both Swiggy and Zomato, expansion is on the radar as they are experimenting in other areas, including grocery delivery.
While Zomato’s shares debuted at a 53% premium to their IPO price last year, the scrip has lost about 62% of its value from an all-time peak of Rs 169.10 in November 2021 and is trading about 20% below the issue price of Rs 76 per share.
Zomato reported a 42% smaller year-on-year net loss for the September quarter, as more people ordered from the platform. However, losses widened sequentially by nearly 35% during the quarter on the back of the Blinkit acquisition.
Separately, its closest competitor Swiggy on Monday reported that annual losses more than doubled during the financial year 2022, hurt by higher expenses, even as more people used the food delivery platform.