IPO-bound Zomato adds four independent women directors

IPO-bound food-delivery firm Zomato has added five new independent members on its board, four of whom are women, as it prepares to go make its public market debut soon.

In a blog post, published on Friday, Zomato’s cofounder & CEO, Deepinder Goyal, said, “And up until now, we had a largely investor run board. But today, I’m elated to share that we have five independent members on our board of eight people, four of whom are women. More than gender diversity though, what we have always been gunning for is cognitive diversity across levels in our organisation. Evidence based research shows that a key prerequisite for innovation comes from cognitively diverse people.”



Among the new independent board directors are Kaushik Dutta, the director of Thought Arbitrage Research Institute, who is taking over as the chairman of the board. Others include professional badminton player Aparna Popat, Gunjan Tilak Raj Soni, CEO of Zalora Group, an ecommerce platforms which runs in South East Asia, Namita Gupta, founder of Airveda, and Sutapa Banerjee who is a behavioural insights advisor.

Douglas Feagin, senior vice president of Ant Group and Info Edge founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani, the two largest investors in Zomato, continue to be on the final board along with Goyal.

Also Read: ETtech IPO Watch | How Zomato's cap table has evolved

Mohit Bhatnagar, MD, Sequoia Capital India has left the board he’d been a part of since October 2015 as per filings sourced from business intelligence platform Tofler.

Goyal said this decision was part of broader efforts by Zomato to make the company more inclusive and diverse. “A number of companies start with a diverse employee base at the entry-level, but it reduces significantly over time, and at senior levels. We decided to turn the paradigm on its head by introducing diversity with our Board of Directors,” he said.

Zomato is expected to go public in the next few months as it closes in on filing its red herring prospectus with market regulator Sebi. ET reported that Zomato is looking to mop up anywhere between $750 million- $1 billion through its public offering. The company had earlier concluded a $500 million pre-IPO round as reported first by ET. The round, a mix of primary capital infusion and secondary sale of shares, had pegged Zomato’s valuation at $5.4 billion.