Bangalore, 3rd August, 2017: Ather Energy, the smart electric two-wheeler start-up, today announced the latest addition to their team, Sunitha Lal as the Head of Human Resources. Sunitha’s immediate focus will be on defining the culture at Ather as they scale up towards production and delivery of their first product, the S340. This comes in as another addition to senior industry veteran hires that Ather has seen over the past few months which include Venki Padmanabhan as COO & Thiruppathy Srinivasan as VP of Vehicle Development.
“It is rare to find an opportunity where you can be part of culture building of not just an organisation, but a nascent industry as well. To weave a pervasive culture across everything we do, be it business processes to employee assimilation, is fantastic.” commented Sunitha. “The most enticing aspect of my role is the chance to outline what Ather stands for and perpetuate that through our frameworks, values and our other programs.”
“Sunitha comes with 20+ years of experience across all HR verticals. She is a strong coach and has a significant background in organizational & leadership development, performance & coaching systems & frameworks.” said Tarun Mehta, CEO of Ather Energy. “We have grown as an organisation and it’s the perfect time for us to focus on our team, the development and the systems that enable this. Both Swapnil and I are very excited about the above topics and we look forward to Sunitha’s support in shaping them.”
In 2007, Sunitha was appointed Vice President and HR Head at AIG Systems Solutions which is an offshore development centre for AIG. There she focused on Organization Development and Succession Planning initiatives.
In 2009, as the SVP & Global Head of Talent Management, Business HR Head at Mphasis, she improved upon the functional effectiveness and efficiency for HR business partner practice and focused in aligning design and delivery of talent management programs and practices to drive business goals.
An alumnus of Madurai Kamaraj University, Sunitha took over as the Chief Human Resources Officer atMatrimony.com, in 2012. As CHRO she was involved in organization-wide decision making to shape business agenda on performance & growth. Sunitha played a key role in identifying, developing and implementing organization effectiveness and change management initiatives.
About Ather Energy:
Ather Energy Pvt. Ltd. is an automobile design and manufacturing company founded in the year 2013 by IIT Madras graduates – Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain. Ather is committed to building smart, connected, uncompromising vehicles and seeks to reimagine urban commute with the help of technology. The company has so far received funding from Hero MotoCorp, Tiger Global and Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal. The team of about 250+ employees is currently developing an electric two-wheeler, which will be completely designed and made In India.
They are presently in their stage of product testing and vendor finalization for their first product, the S340. Aided by a breakthrough in-house designed, Lithium-ion battery pack, the Ather S340 has a touchscreen dashboard with cloud connectivity, a host of smart features and offers a top speed of 72 kmph and a range of up to 60kms. Ather is also setting up a charging network with its own smart charging pods. These fast charging pods will be set up initially across its three market cities – Bangalore, Chennai & Pune.
