Travel booking website Yatra has appointed Chakrapani Gollapali as the chief business officer of Holidays. In his new role, Gollapali will be responsible for the the direction and operations and overall business for the Holidays unit of Yatra. Overall Gollapali has over 20 years of experience in technology, mobile and consumer businesses. Prior to Yatra, he served as the country general manager for Microsoft India, incharge of all of Microsoft’s consumer categories including Windows, Office, Windows Phone and Xbox across the retail, online, OEM and operator channels. Before this, Gollapali served at Nokia for 6 years as the general manager of the E-series Smartphones business in India, as well as helped create mobile payments business for Nokia. In his early career, he also founded and ran an internet startup called Office Infinity that offered consumables and supplies space, for three years. FINO Paytech tie-up: Last month, Yatra partnered with FINO paytech to let users book Yatra tickets through GINO Money centres. The platform mentioned that this partnership would enable migrants from other towns, people from rural areas and low income households to book tickets on Yatra offline. Yatra funding: In April last year, Yatra raised Rs 140 crore in funding from IDG Ventures India and Vertex Venture Holdings. Earlier investors Norwest Venture Partners, Intel Capital, TV18 Group and Reliance Venture Asset Management also participated in this round, increasing the stake of institutional investors in the company to 80% (at the time). Yatra had said it would use the funding for branding, expanding its…
