MUMBAI: The board of Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd (Zeel) today approved the appointment of former HCL and Pepsico India executive Saurav Adhikari as an additional director in the category of non-executive director. It informed the BSE about his addition to the company through a regulatory filing in the evening of 28 November 2024.
Adhikari is currently the founder & senior partner at Indus Tech Edge Fund I, a growth fund focused on globalising India’s vibrant technology ecosystem. He is the former chairman of NASDAQ listed Vahanna Tech Edge Acquisition I Corp (a special purpose acquisition company (Spac)) and has after a successful DeSpac/merger moved on to the board of NASDAQ listed Roadzen. He also serves as a board member of Goodricke Group Ltd, Accelya Solutions India Ltd, (both listed in India), and Bridgeweave Ltd UK, an AI based fintech firm. He works as a technology advisor and investor with interests across AI based fintech and healthcare firms, as well as analytics, IoT and logistics firms. He serves as a senior advisor in the Shiv Nadar Foundation and is a board member of the Shiv Nadar University.
Adhikari has impeccable credentials. Especially while with the HCL group. He worked on several multi-billion-dollar inorganic investments in technology and software, carve-outs of multiple enterprise software product suites, joint ventures with global majors, all to transform and reinvent HCL’s business. He was instrumental in strategising HCL’s pivoting of its business model to a leading intellectual property-led solutions company. In his technology role, he had built deep inroads into global private equity and VC firms, while creating large, successful, value-based partnerships between HCL and private equity owned technology businesses, which are considered groundbreaking in the industry.
At HCL, he held various executive positions, the last being president, global strategy, working directly with the founder & chairman with oversight across the group’s business, as well as the not-for-profit Shiv Nadar Foundation. During this time, he contributed to HCL's immense growth from a sub $200mn revenue company in 2000 to a $14bn revenue and over $50bn market cap today, transforming it into one of the world’s leading, and India’s third largest IT/technology firms and India’s no. 1 software product company.
His prior experience also includes several senior global leadership and executive roles across Unilever, as vice President at PepsiCo and Group SEB (Tefal India) and as CEO of the India business.
