Flipkart’s Loss is ClearTax Gain

For ClearTax they “will bring in critical domain-specific expertise to our team and help propel us to the next phase of our growth journey”, but what’s propelling mass exodus of top level executives from e-retailing giant Flipkart?

After the departure of its chief product officer Punit Soni, head of commerce platform Mukesh Bansal, chief business officer Ankit Nagori, Manish Maheshwari, CTO Amod Malvyia and senior vice president Sameer Nigam, the latest ones to bid adieu at Flipkart are three top techies - Prasanth Nair, Aakash Bapna, and Jai Santosh.

Prasnth Nair will be vice president - engineering, apart from heading the product and technology group at ClearTax. Bapna and Santosh have been roped in as senior software engineers. As director engineering at Flipkart, Nair was responsible for scaling up the company's fulfillment platform.

Bapna helmed Flipkart's front-end systems and teams from scratch while Santosh was busy with software engineering and tech development, the statement from ClearTax founder-CEO Archit Gupta said.

For Jai Santosh, ClearTax’s “focus on technology as a solution enabler is solving a real problem for the Indian consumer by making the process of filing taxes and financial savings simpler and more efficient."

Founded in 2011 by IIT-Guwahati pass-out Archit Gupta, his chartered accountant father Raja Ram Gupta, Srivatsan Chari and AnkitSolanki, ClearTax enables individuals to file their tax returns online through its website.

A user just has to upload his/her Form-16 PDF and the ClearTax software prepares the tax return instantly and automatically. In the assessment year 2014-15, ClearTax processed e-filings for 300,000 individuals, which increased to an estimated one million people in 2015-16 fiscal.

The top level exits at Flipkart are coming at a time when the company is facing renewed and strong competition from the likes of Amazon, Snapdeal, Paytm and others. While Flipkart has managed to retain its numero uno position in Indian e-commerce, it has definitely lost some of its sheen in recent months, the highlight being Morgan Stanley devaluation.