Google India head Rajan Anandan quits; joins Sequoia Capital India

Google South East Asia and India Vice-President Rajan Anandan will leave the company by April-end and join Sequoia Capital India as a Managing Director.

Rajan will join six other Managing Director in his new role at Sequoia Capital India. He will be an investment advisor and mentor to Surge founders.

Surge is a scale-up programme for startups in India and South East Asia.

Rajan tweeted: "8 amazing years. 850million internet users across India and SEA. Many billions of revenue and fastest growing region in the world. Incredible team that thinks big and executes superbly."

At Google, Vikas Agnihotri, Country Director, Sales, will be the interim head for Google India.

"We are grateful to Rajan for his huge contribution to Google over the past eight years. His entrepreneurial zeal and leadership has helped grow the overall internet ecosystem in India and Southeast Asia, and we wish him all the best in his new adventures," said Scott Beaumont, President, Google Asia Pacific in a statement.

Before he joined Google in February 2011, Rajan served as the Managing Director for Microsoft India for two years. He has also worked with Dell India and McKinsey & Company.

Rajan had also won IMPACT Person of the Year award in 2018 for driving Internet adoption across India, especially in Tier II and III towns, through several initiatives including ‘Navlekha’, Google’s platform for users in India who are not conversant with English, Google ‘Internet Saathi’, an initiative to bring more rural women online, and the Indian Railways high-speed Wi-Fi project, providing free Wi-Fi to consumers at railway stations across the country.

While he was managing India and South East Asia for Google, Rajan was also the President of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE)-Delhi chapter, a not-for-profit organisation that nuture startups.