It was a busy day at Ola, the country’s largest cab-hailing company, with Chief Financial Officer Rajiv Bansal and Chief Marketing Officer Raghuvesh Sarup submitting their resignations while Badri Raghavan, the former CTO of Boston-based FirstFuel Software, a leading energy and utilities analytics firm, joined the company as its first Chief Data Scientist.

The resignations come days after one of Ola’s main investors, SoftBank wrote off around $475 million in the value of its combined shareholding in Ola as well as e-commerce player, Snapdeal.

Bansal, the former Infosys CFO, quits Ola at a time when the company is looking at raising fresh funds at a far lower valuation of about $3 billion, compared to the $5 billion it was valued at earlier.

Pallav Singh, Ola’s senior Vice-President, has been made the company’s interim CFO.

Ola has been hit by a series of exits over the last one year with several mid- and top-level executives leaving the company.

At the same time, it has been been able to recruit some top executives.

Apart from Raghavan, it recently roped in SAB Miller Managing Director Shalabh Seth as the CEO of Ola Fleet Technologies.

Scaling up On Raghavan’s appointment, Ola’s CTO and co-founder Ankit Bhati said the company is moving towards a much larger scale, building technology based on deep insights into the Indian psyche, and for this, Big Data is a must.

“With over a million trips on the platform every single day, an enormous amount of data is available for us to utilise intelligently. With a rich vein of expertise in data science and machine learning, Badri fits perfectly into Ola’s vision of building ground-up technology solutions based on deep understanding of our customers, and building world-class innovative solutions,” Bhati said.

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