Ola’s chief financial officer Rajiv Bansal who left Infosys to work at the ride-hailing service has quit after spending over a year at the firm, according to people familiar with the matter. An Ola official who didn’t wish to be named confirmed the development. An alumnus of St. Xavier’s College, Mr.Bansal had joined Ola in 2016 after stepping down as CFO of Infosys. Ola has named its senior vice president Pallav Singh, as the company’s interim CFO, according to a source. The source said that Ola’s chief marketing officer Raghuvesh Sarup has also resigned from the company. Experts say that Ola, which is backed by marquee investors like SoftBank and Sequoia, is need of fresh funds to outrun its US-based rival Uber. In a separate development, the Bengaluru-based company, announced the appointment of data scientist Badri Raghavan, with over 20 years of extensive domain experience, as its chief data scientist.“Ola is moving on a much larger scale towards building technology based on deep insight into the Indian psyche, and for this, Big Data is a must,” said Ankit Bhati, chief technology officer and co-founder of Ola in a statement. “With a rich vein of expertise in data science and machine learning, Badri (Raghavan) fits perfectly into Ola’s vision.” Prior to Ola, Mr. Raghavan was the chief data scientist at FirstFuel Software, a leading energy and utilities analytics firm based out of Boston.
