Zeel appoints Saurav Adhikari as Additional Non-Executive Director

New Delhi: The Board of Directors of Zee Entertainment Enterprises (Zeel) appointed Saurav Adhikari as an Additional Director in the category of Non-Executive Director.

The term of Adhikari was valid till the Annual General Meeting of the Company held on November 28, 2024.

According to the regulatory filing by the company, Adhikari is a senior global business leader with four decades of deep domain expertise in global businesses/markets, across technology, FMCG, and consumer durables sectors as an operations, general management and investment specialist. In over two decades in the technology sector with HCL (2000-2019), he has held multiple leadership roles as the Founding President of HCL’s startup enterprise networking firm, led a team that established what has now become a multi-hundred million dollar IT-enabled services (‘ITES’) business, served as President of HCL’s ITES North American business, and as President of Global Corporate Strategy.

Adhikari has worked on several multi-billion-dollar inorganic investments in technology and software, carve-outs of multiple enterprise software product suites, and joint ventures with global majors, all to transform and reinvent HCL’s business. He was instrumental in strategizing HCL’s pivoting of its business model to a leading intellectual property-led solutions company. 

In his technology role, he had built deep inroads into global private equity and VC firms, while creating large, successful, value-based partnerships between HCL and private equity-owned technology businesses, which are considered groundbreaking in the industry.

At HCL, he held various executive positions, the last being President, Global Strategy, working directly with the Founder & Chairman with oversight across the group’s business, as well as the not-for-profit Shiv Nadar Foundation. During this time, he contributed to HCL's immense growth from a ~$200mn revenue company in 2000 to a ~$14bn revenue and over $50bn market cap today, transforming it into one of the world’s leading, and India’s 3rd largest IT/Technology firms and India’s No. 1 Software Product company.

His prior experience also includes several senior global leadership and executive roles across Unilever, as Vice President at PepsiCo and Group SEB as CEO of the India business.

Adhikari is currently the Founder & Sr. Partner at Indus Tech Edge Fund I, a growth fund focused on globalizing India’s vibrant technology ecosystem. He is the former Chairman of NASDAQ-listed Vahanna Tech Edge Acquisition I Corp (A Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC)) and has after a successful DeSPAC/merger moved on to the board of NASDAQ listed Roadzen Inc (ticker RDZN). 

Adhikari also serves as a board member of Goodricke Group Limited, Accelya Solutions India Limited, (both listed in India), and Bridgeweave Limited, UK, an AI-based Fintech firm. 

He works as a technology advisor and investor with interests across AI-based fintech and healthcare firms, as well as analytics, IoT and logistics firms. He also serves as a Senior Advisor in the Shiv Nadar Foundation and is a Board Member of the Shiv Nadar University.