MAM
Atique Kazi bids farewell to WPP Media after 13 years
MUMBAI: After more than a decade of shaping India’s digital advertising playbook, Atique Kazi has stepped away from WPP Media, bringing down the curtain on a 13 year leadership journey across data, performance, commerce and emerging tech.
Kazi’s exit marks the end of an era spent building some of the most influential digital and commerce capabilities within the WPP ecosystem, at a time when India emerged as one of the fastest transforming advertising markets globally.
Reflecting on his journey, Kazi called it a “very special chapter”, crediting the people, culture and timing that defined his run. He spoke of growing through multiple leadership roles across performance, programmatic, data and commerce, while contributing to what he described as truly transformative industry work.
At WPP Media and GroupM, Kazi most recently served as president for e-commerce, performance and digital products in India, a role he held from 2021. Before that, he spent eight years at Xaxis, including stints as managing director in India and vice president for new business in Singapore, helping scale programmatic offerings across markets.
Among the standout platforms built under his leadership were Xaxis India’s programmatic solutions, Turbine which grew into India’s largest scaled DMP, Finecast India’s connected TV advertising platform, and Inca APAC, an AI powered influencer marketing business spanning nine countries. He also helped establish full stack performance and commerce service suites that became central to client growth strategies.
Kazi was generous in his acknowledgements, thanking colleagues, mentors, clients and partners across the WPP network for their trust and collaboration. A special mention went to his teams, whom he credited for turning ambitious ideas into products that delivered consistent client impact, while still making time for the lighter moments along the way.
“WPP Media skilled me up in fostering innovation, continuous reinvention, client centricity and leading with purpose,” he said, adding that while it was not easy to say goodbye to a place that had long felt like home, the time felt right to embrace new opportunities.
Before WPP, Kazi built an international career spanning Yahoo, The Economist, The Times of India, JVC and Hutchison Whampoa, with roles across India, the Middle East, the UK and Singapore. Each stop added another layer to a career that blended media, technology and commercial strategy.
As he signs off from WPP Media, Kazi leaves behind a legacy of platforms, people and progress, and an industry keen to see what chapter he writes next.
Brands
Tessolve lands a semiconductor veteran to drive its next big push
Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, who started his career at ISRO and has spent 35 years building chips and companies, joins the Bengaluru-based firm as president and chief operating officer
BENGALURU: Tessolve has never been shy about its ambitions. The Bengaluru-based engineering services firm already counts 18 of the world’s top 20 semiconductor companies among its clients, employs more than 3,500 engineers across 12 countries, and last year pocketed a $150m investment from TPG. Now it has hired the executive it believes can turn those assets into something bigger. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, a 35-year semiconductor veteran who once built satellite payloads for ISRO and has since scaled engineering organisations across three continents, joins as president and chief operating officer, effective immediately.
THE MAN AND THE MANDATE
The appointment is, by any measure, a serious hire. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu comes to Tessolve after senior leadership stints at HCL Technologies, Altran and Wipro, where he managed large profit-and-loss portfolios and oversaw cross-regional teams. Over the course of his career, he has been instrumental in bringing more than 1,000 new products to market across the high-tech, energy and manufacturing verticals. Before the private sector claimed him, he began his working life as a scientist at the Indian Space Research Organisation, contributing to research and development in charge-coupled device technology and satellite payloads, a foundation that shaped everything that followed.
In his new role, he will lead Tessolve’s global growth strategy: expanding its engineering capabilities, deepening customer relationships and accelerating innovation across semiconductor and high-performance computing domains. The brief is broad, but the context is specific. Tessolve operates in the $550 billion global semiconductor market, and its recent moves, the acquisition of Germany’s Dream Chip Technologies and the TPG funding round, have sharpened both its reach and its expectations.
Srini Chinamilli, co-founder and chief executive of Tessolve, is characteristically direct about why Ravi Kumar Chirugudu was the choice:
“As we scale our global semiconductor and system engineering capabilities, Ravi’s appointment marks an important step forward. As global semiconductor demand continues to accelerate across industries, it is creating significant opportunities across the semiconductor lifecycle, from design, packaging, validation and systems integration. Ravi’s deep knowledge and leadership in this ecosystem brings the right mix of industry expertise, customer connect and execution capability, which will play a key role in strengthening our position as a trusted global engineering partner and reinforcing our market leadership.”
THE NEW ARRIVAL SPEAKS
Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, for his part, frames the move in terms of timing and culture, two factors that veteran executives tend to weigh as heavily as title or compensation:
“I am happy to join Tessolve at a time when the industry is rapidly evolving towards more complex, AI-driven systems. What stands out to me is its strong people-first culture and its commitment to bringing value to its customers. The strength of its global team, combined with its deep expertise in semiconductor innovation and next-generation product engineering, creates a solid foundation to build differentiated, scalable solutions. I look forward to working closely with the team to drive strategic growth and strengthen its role in shaping the global semiconductor ecosystem.”
The reference to AI-driven systems is not incidental. The semiconductor industry is in the midst of a structural reshaping, driven by the insatiable compute demands of artificial intelligence. For engineering services firms like Tessolve, which offers end-to-end capabilities from silicon design to packaged parts and invests in high-performance computing, high-speed interfaces, photonics and 5G, the moment is both an opportunity and a test. The company says it is well positioned to capture the next wave of industry growth. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu is now the person who has to prove it.
He came in from outer space, literally, and spent three decades learning how the semiconductor industry works from the inside out. Now Tessolve is betting that accumulated knowledge can help it cross the next frontier. In the $550 billion global chip market, the gap between ambition and execution is measured in engineering hours and leadership quality. Tessolve has just gone shopping for both.
