Aditya Agarwal joins Flipkart as independent director

India’s largest e-commerce firm Flipkart is making a lot of changes to its senior level team. The aim is to race ahead of competition amid Amazon announcing aggressive India plans and Japan’s SoftBank heavily investing in Snapdeal. After handing over greater responsibility to Myntra founder and roping in ex-CEO of Calvin Klein Rishi Vasudev as VP of fashion retail business, the company has appointed Aditya Agarwal, who heads engineering at the US-based cloud storage start-up Dropbox, as an Independent Director on its board.

The buzz is Agarwal has joined the board of Flipkart’s Singapore holding entity, Flipkart, in the September quarter. Agarwal and his wife Ruchi Sanghvi were among the earliest employees at Facebook and they helped build the engineering team at the social network site. The duo left in 2011 to start a company called Cove, which was acquired by Dropbox the next year. Dropbox, received 325 million dollars (over Rs 1,388 crores) in funds at an estimated value of 10 billion dollars (over Rs 61,700 crores) in February, according to media reports. Dropbox investors include Accel Partners, the earliest to invest in Flipkart. There were also media reports of Flipkart eyeing another funding deal.

Another name that joined the leadership team is Parameswaran Balakrishnan, who was appointed Vice President (HR) for supply chain. Balakrishnan will look at driving all business partnering, talent acquisition and functional learning and development for supply chain at the company. He has over two decades of experience working with organisations like Toyota and Tata Motors. In his previous assignment, he was heading employee relations and corporate social responsibility of Tata Motors’s India operations.