Rohit Chadda


Rohit Chadda is the CEO for the digital business at Zee group. He is an investment banker and entrepreneur and was the co-founder of online food ordering platform Foodpanda. He is also the founder of omni-channel payments platform PayLo.

Education and early career

Chadda graduated from Delhi Technological University with a degree in computer engineering and worked as a software engineer for Computer Sciences Corporation. In 2007 he joined Indian Institute of Management Calcutta to do his MBA after which he worked at Merrill Lynch as an Investment Banker in United Kingdom. He took an internal transfer to India in 2011.

Career

Foodpanda

Chadda began his career in 2012 when he co-founded foodpanda. foodpanda expanded to around 40 countries before being bought by Delivery Hero. Before foodpanda got popular, he joked that he delivered pizza for a living. foodpanda had raised a total investment of over US$100 million till August 2014.
Chadda in the middle of 2015 stepped down from day-to-day responsibilities at Foodpanda and was no longer a managing director. In 2020, LiveMint published allegations that Rohit Chadda had awarded a call centre contract with foodpanda to a company with connections to his family members, which Chadda denied.

Paylo

In 2015, he launched a multi-channel offline payments platform PayLo which acquired the in-restaurant payments app Ruplee in March 2016 for an undisclosed sum. PayLo was successful in the wake of demonetisation in India and expanded pan-India before being acquired by Immortal Technologies. Chadda believes that execution is more important than the idea to make a startup successful and the key challenge for experienced professionals to work in a startup environment is to unlearn what they have previously learned. PayLo acquired Ruplee before being itself acquired by Immortal Technologies.

Zee Group

In July 2, 2019, he was named CEO of digital publishing of Zee Group. He was given the direct oversight of the "news digital content team, product team and technology team." Since 2017, he had led global product and strategy for Zee Group.

Investing and speaking

Chadda is a mentor at Esselerator, a Startup accelerator by Subhash Chandra Foundation. Esselerator is an initiative by Subhash Chandra, a billionaire Media baron, to promote and support tech entrepreneurs in domains like Media, Fintech and Education. Its powered by TiE Mumbai. Chadda is an angel investor in the online school aggregator platform SchoolForSure.com. In 2019, he spoke at DPS to students on starting a business. At the time he remained CEO of Zee group's digital business division.

Award and recognitions