CEO Rakesh Deshmukh Resigns from Indus Appstore, Owned by PhonePe
Rakesh Deshmukh, one of the co-founders of the app-discovery platform Indus Appstore owned by PhonePe, has resigned from his position as Chief Executive Officer and departed from the company.
Founded in 2013 by Deshmukh along with Akash Dongre and Sudhir Bangarambandi, all alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, the company was initially named Indus OS. It was recently rebranded as Indus Appstore.
“As I step down from the CEO role, I’m taking a moment to recharge and prepare for the next impactful journey,” Deshmukh wrote in a post on professional networking platform Linkedin.
Dongre and Bangarambandi are currently serving in key roles at Indus Appstore, with Dongre as the Chief Product Officer and Bangarambandi as the Chief Technology Officer. In May 2022, PhonePe, backed by Walmart, acquired OSLabs, the parent company of Indus Appstore, for $90 million. This acquisition followed an out-of-court settlement with Affle Global, the then-majority shareholder.
In the previous year, PhonePe unveiled the Indus Appstore developer platform, extending its accessibility to other Android developers, aiming to disrupt the duopoly maintained by Google and Apple.
The digital payments firm stated that the developer platform would be free of charge for developers during the initial year, with a nominal annual fee applicable thereafter.
Additionally, the company declared that the app store would refrain from imposing any platform commission on developers for in-app payments, aiming to compete against the 30% commission levied by Apple and Google.
Prior to being acquired by PhonePe, Indus Appstore had garnered support from notable backers such as Omidyar Network India, Samsung Ventures, JSW Ventures, and Titan Capital.
