Google Chromecast Product Manager Heads For India’s E-Commerce Scene, Joining Fashion Retailer Myntra

BANGALORE, India -- India’s fashion retailer Myntra has snagged another Google Inc. engineer, adding to the steady trickle of Indian-born mid-level executives from California's Silicon Valley who are returning to take on opportunities in the Asian subcontinent’s nascent mobile-commerce scene.

Ambarish Kenghe, formerly Google product manager for Chromecast, is joining Myntra as senior vice president and head of products, moving from Mountain View, California, to Bangalore. He will report to Myntra Chief Executive Mukesh Bansal and work on making Myntra’s mobile-only strategy a success, the Indian startup said in a news release Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Myntra's parent company Flipkart has lured away Eric Lange, a Yahoo vice president, CNBC reported, citing a statement from the Indian e-commerce company. At Yahoo, Lange managed analytics and publisher products for ad business, and led the recent acquisitions of Flurry and BrightRoll, the report said.

India’s nascent Internet businesses are looking to leapfrog the desktop and cash in on the country’s smartphone revolution. India is projected to become the second-largest smartphone market in the world after China, overtaking the U.S. by 2017.

Companies such as Myntra and Flipkart are betting on a mobile-only strategy, closing their websites to the public, and requiring consumers to download their apps on smartphones. They are also hiring Indians from Silicon Valley to help them build their products to handle the hundreds of millions of users they anticipate in the coming years.

“India has a confluence of factors coming together to make it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for technology professionals to make a difference,” Kenghe said in the release.

Some two-thirds of India’s 250 million or so Internet users access the Net on their smartphones and more first-time users are joining that base everyday. The base is projected to more than double by 2020, as more Indians replace their basic phones with smartphones.

Kenghe co-founded and led product management for Google Chromecast. He was instrumental in its conceptualization, making it one of the best-selling electronic devices and one of the highly decorated hardware products from Google, Myntra said in the release. He holds a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and master’s degrees in computer science and engineering from Purdue University and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

Kenghe will “build the next generation of mobile products to deliver a highly engaging and personalized fashion experience to our customers," Bansal said in the release. Bansal is also head of all commerce at parent company Flipkart.

Earlier this year, Flipkart hired Punit Soni, former head of all software products at Motorola Mobility under Google, as chief products officer.