Paytm hires ex-Google executives to build its Ad business and Cloud capabilities

Digital payments leader Paytm, the brand owned by One97 Communications has today announced the expansion of its leadership team with two former Google executives, Praveen Sharma, and Ankit Sinha. Praveen Sharma has been appointed as Senior Vice President, Ad Business and will be responsible for leading the group's foray into advertising across Paytm businesses. Ankit Sinha has joined as Vice President, Paytm AI Cloud and will be responsible for productization of the best of Paytm's technology stack. Both of them will report directly to Paytm Founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder & CEO of Paytm said, “Over the years, Paytm has built a large consumer and merchant base. Focusing on monetization opportunities, we will have Praveen and Ankit build our advertising and cloud offerings for Indian businesses. Praveen has built the most formidable adverting business and Ankit comes with an understanding of SMB needs.”

Praveen Sharma comes from Google where he spent the last 9 years in leadership roles across India and APAC. Most recently he was based in Singapore responsible for driving Google's performance media across the Asia Pacific region. This was preceded by his stint in India where he led Google India's YouTube and Display sales organization. Leading up to Google, Praveen held several senior-level positions across some of the major advertising groups like Madison and Group M.

“Paytm is arguably the most diverse consumer tech company in India with interest ranging from payments, commerce, financial services, ticketing, flights, gaming, etc. With a user base of 350 million and a massive transaction and traffic volume and momentum, it's poised just right to build an ads business that sits on top of all of these services. I'm very excited to be leading this charge”, said Praveen Sharma.

Ankit Sinha comes with 15 years of professional experience. Previously, he worked as Regional Business Lead at Google Cloud for six years, primarily in the cloud sales and enterprise partnerships role. Prior to Google, he was part of SAP for seven years, building the SMBs focused partner program.

Talking about his new role at Paytm, Ankit Sinha said, “Paytm has ushered digital payments in India and I am excited to be a part of this team. We expect to start new revenue streams with our SMB merchants, as well as larger corporations across developers and various lines of business. Paytm would leverage its big data and machine learning prowess to provide innovative solutions in different markets.”