MAM
Viral goes viral at National Payments Corp RuPay unit
BENGALURU: The National Payments Corp of India (NPCI) has landed Viral Maru as its new head of RuPay, betting that her decade-long streak of making plastic fantastic will turbocharge India’s homegrown card network. Maru’s mandate? Transform RuPay from plucky underdog into a credit, digital and tokenised payments juggernaut that can slug it out with the Visa-Mastercard duopoly.
It’s a hire that makes sense. Maru has spent the better part of ten years making Indians swipe, tap and spend. Most recently, as vice-president and head of banking and payments at Fi, she steered the Neobank’s charge into cards and UPI. Before that, she spent five months at Tata Digital as director of strategic initiatives, having already put in two-and-a-half years launching the Tata Neu HDFC Bank credit card—an app-first assault on India’s loyalty ecosystem.
But it’s her nearly six-year stint at HDFC Bank that really sharpened her chops. As vertical head of digital acquisitions and innovation, she doubled online-sourced cards year-on-year, moved 80 per cent of physical sales to digitally assisted channels, and built API stacks that made card onboarding almost frictionless. She also championed tokenisation on Google Pay and Jio Pay, and launched instant card issuance—the sort of stuff that makes fintech types go weak at the knees.
Earlier, as product and portfolio head for Diners Club consumer cards at HDFC, she doubled acceptance coverage across India and dreamt up a self-sustaining 10X rewards programme that turned Diners into the card of choice for the swish set. She even put real-time lounge usage displays on point-of-sale terminals—an industry first that made airport lounges slightly less of a scrum.
Her career started at Axis Bank, where she launched online remittance platforms for the UAE, America, Britain, Singapore and Canada, and grew NRI accounts by 50 per cent year-on-year. A stint at Citibank India polished her acquisition and brand-building skills before she entered the big leagues.
Now, with NPCI’s backing and India’s digital payments infrastructure maturing at breakneck speed, Maru has her work cut out. RuPay may already be ubiquitous at petrol pumps and kirana shops, but cracking premium cards and credit is another game entirely. If anyone can make it happen, though, it’s someone whose career has quite literally gone viral.
Brands
Delhivery chairman Deepak Kapoor, independent director Saugata Gupta quit board
Gurugram: Delhivery’s boardroom is being reset. Deepak Kapoor, chairman and independent director, has resigned with effect from April 1 as part of a planned board reconstitution, the logistics company said in an exchange filing. Saugata Gupta, managing director and chief executive of FMCG major Marico and an independent director on Delhivery’s board, has also stepped down.
Kapoor exits after an eight-year stint that included steering the company through its 2022 stock-market debut, a period that saw Delhivery transform from a venture-backed upstart into one of India’s most visible logistics platforms. Gupta, who joined the board in 2021, departs alongside him, marking a simultaneous clearing of two senior independent seats.
“Deepak and Saugata have been instrumental in our process of recognising the need for and enabling the reconstitution of the board of directors in line with our ambitious next phase of growth,” said Sahil Barua, managing director and chief executive, Delhivery. The statement frames the exits less as departures and more as deliberate succession, a boardroom shuffle timed to the company’s evolving scale and strategy.
The resignations arrive amid broader governance recalibration. In 2025, Delhivery appointed Emcure Pharmaceuticals whole-time director Namita Thapar, PB Fintech founder and chairman Yashish Dahiya, and IIM Bangalore faculty member Padmini Srinivasan as independent directors, signalling a tilt towards consumer, fintech and academic expertise at the board level.
Kapoor’s tenure spanned Delhivery’s most defining years, rapid network expansion, public listing and the push towards profitability in a bruising logistics market. Gupta’s presence brought FMCG and brand-scale perspective during a period when ecommerce volumes and last-mile delivery economics were being rewritten.
The twin exits, effective from the new financial year, underscore a familiar corporate rhythm: founders consolidate, veterans rotate out, and fresh voices are ushered in to script the next chapter. In India’s hyper-competitive logistics race, even the boardroom does not stand still.
MAM
Meta appoints Anuvrat Rao as APAC head of commerce partnerships
At Locofy.ai, Rao helped convert a three-year free beta into a paid engine, clocking 1,000 subscribers and 15 enterprise clients within ten days of launch in September 2024. The low-code startup, backed by Accel and top tech founders, is famed for turning designs into production-ready code using proprietary large design models.
Before that, Rao founded generative AI venture 1Bstories, which was acquired by creative AI platform Laetro in mid-2024, where he briefly served as managing director for APAC. Alongside operating roles, he has been an active investor and advisor since 2020, backing startups such as BotMD, Muxy, Creator plus, Intellect, Sealed and CricFlex through a creator-economy-led thesis.
Rao spent over eight years at Google, holding senior partnership roles across search, assistant, chrome, web and YouTube in APAC, and earlier cut his teeth in strategy consulting at OC&C in London and investment finance at W. P. Carey in Europe and the US.
Brands
Brnd.me enters Europe as haircare brands power global expansion
Bengaluru: Brnd.me, the global consumer brands company formerly known as Mensa Brands, has entered the European market following strong momentum across the Middle East, the United States and Canada.
The company has launched across the UK, Germany, France and Spain, with plans to expand into Italy, the Netherlands and Poland over the next year. The push is being led by its haircare and aromatherapy brands, Botanic Hearth and Majestic Pure, marking Brnd.me’s first structured expansion into Europe.
The European beauty market represents a total addressable opportunity of over $4 billion across haircare and aromatherapy, supported by high digital adoption and demand for accessible, performance-led products.
Brnd.me’s hair care and aromatherapy business currently operates at an annual run rate of around $6 million, with Botanic Hearth and Majestic Pure delivering roughly 10 per cent month-on-month growth, driven by expansion and rising repeat demand.
To support regional growth, the company has appointed a general manager based in Germany and is evaluating investments in warehousing and local team expansion.
Early traction has been strong. Within weeks of launch, Botanic Hearth’s rosemary hair oil ranked among the top five hair oils in Germany, signalling strong consumer pull in a competitive market.
Brnd.me founder and chief executive officer Ananth Narayanan, said Europe represents the next phase of the company’s international strategy. He added that the European business is expected to scale to a $10 million annual run rate by the end of 2026, with long-term ambitions to reach $60 million over the next six years.
The company’s Europe strategy centres on digital-first distribution, repeat demand and TikTok-led discovery, alongside direct-to-consumer expansion to strengthen brand equity and margins.
The move also aligns with growing EU–India trade engagement, supporting long-term sourcing and cross-border supply chains.
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