Exclusive: Grofers’ CTO Jacob Singh quits after a 3 years stint

Jacob Singh, the chief technology officer of Grofers, has put in his papers after a three-year tenure at the full stack grocery and daily essentials delivery firm.

Grofers has confirmed the development saying that Singh’s decision to quit the company came in the pre-Covid-19 lockdown period. However, the company retained him for the next couple of months. 

In his initial nine months, Singh was the technical leadership coach for the company and in the capacity of CTO, he headed product, engineering, data, and design for the e-grocer. According to his LinkedIn profile, Singh led the tech team from 50 to 220 at Grofers and built the company’s technology sound enough to scale it up to $600 million GMV from $40 million in three years.

He was instrumental for the design, launch and scaling of Grofers’ paid loyalty program. A graduate of Berkeley City College, Singh has previously worked with Acquia as country head before joining Grofers. 

“At this stage, the company has reached a substantial scale and I felt like my talents as a startup leader could be better used elsewhere. Currently, I am helping to mentor a few high-growth tech startups and looking forward to taking up independent consulting opportunities,” said Singh to Entrackr in a response to email queries.

Grofers has been dealing with a surge in demand and a disruption in its supply chain amid the fear of the spread of the coronavirus. The Albinder Dhindsa-led firm has done a decent job in serving customers during the first two phases of the lockdown.

The firm was recently in talks for a potential merger with Zomato and investment from Paytm Mall. However, the talks seem to have fizzled out. Grofers has also been powering Zomato’s grocery offering but the Ant Financial-backed firm decided to downscale its grocery delivery service - Zomato Market. It is likely to shut down the grocery vertical soon.

Besides grocery and FMCG offerings, Grofers had also started selling fashion products including footwear, clothes and accessories. Entrackr had exclusively reported on the development in March.

The SoftBank-backed company had a revenue of Rs 1,282.3 crore in FY19 registering a 2.4X growth as compared to Rs 532.8 crore in FY18.  Its total expenditure also rose to 2X  to Rs 1,993.5 crore in FY19. Fintrackr had exclusively reported Grofers’ financials by tracking its filings in Singapore.