ZEE5 India bolsters Product & Tech Team through key appointments

ZEE5, the Entertainment Super App of India, today announced key appointments in their product and technology team. As part of the strategy to further drive next stage of growth and innovation, ZEE5 has on boarded Anjul Sachan as chief architect – Adtech, Manit Kathuria as head – user experience, Prateek Pant as head - Video Engineering and Mandar Deodhar as director, technology (Payments).

Anjul Sachan, a graduate from IIT Bombay, in his new role, will be leading the AdTech Architects team at ZEE5. He will be responsible for the R&D as well as technical execution of all AdTech projects including AdServer, SelfServe and Optimization Engine among others. He brings with him a rich experience in building and managing ad recommendation, content feed personalization and self-service portal for advertisers and publishers. In his previous avatar, Anjul has led AdTech growth strategies and product roadmap for Times Internet Limited Adtech division, while working on some solutions for ad platforms, data forecasting, audience data management, ad-blocker, ad-Fraud identification and so on.

Manit Kathuria brings over 14 years of design experience with him. In his current role with ZEE5, he will lead the CX experience from a product perspective. His key focus involves solving consumer problems across platforms effectively and quickly; building a seamless experience for both AVOD and SVOD users. He will lead the Product Design team to achieve these goals at ZEE5. An alumnus of the University of Washington in Seattle, he has also been instrumental in building companies such as Rooja.com, Exclusively.com and Prophesee during his early days in the fashion and SAAS space. He has formerly worked as the Head of Design and UX for companies like Snapdeal, Fabhotels among others. Before joining ZEE5, he was a part of Magicbricks as Head of User Experience.

Prateek Pant, with an experience of over 18 years in technical leadership experience in video technologies has led the design and development of several multimedia CE products and OTT platforms. In his new role at ZEE5, he will be handling end to end video engineering from Transcoding, Encoding, CDN and all player playability across platforms and will also be focussed on Video Pipelines for Meta Generation. He is passionate about IoT, video inferencing using AI/ML, AR/VR and cloud computing. Prior to joining ZEE5, he has worked with leading firms like Astro, Technicolor, Cisco, Maxim Integrated, Samsung Electronics and DRDO.

Lastly, Mandar Deodhar joins as director - technology. He will be responsible for end to end technology requirements for Subscription, Payments and all third-party integrations. Mandar is an IIT Bombay alumni from MTech 2005 batch and has worked in different companies like Indiagames, Disney, Citrus Payments, Hotstar & HERE Maps.

These key hiring’s will augment ZEE5’s vision to strengthen its Product & Tech team and build a robust Adtech architecture that is critical to platforms ability to deliver continuous innovation.