MAM
Cashfree appoints Vaibhav Mehrotra as marketing head
KOLKATA: Payments and API banking solutions company Cashfree has appointed Vaibhav Mehrotra as the marketing head to drive the company’s marketing strategy through its aggressive growth phase.
He will be responsible for building the brand while instilling industry best practices across brand marketing, product marketing, digital and performance marketing. He will also build a strong marketing team under his leadership.
With a career spanning over 13 years, he has worked in leadership positions at DLF Ltd, Max Group, Cognizant Interactive, and Photon Interactive. In his most recent role as the head of brand and marketing, Office Business at DLF, he led the marketing charter across six cities, launched various products and brand campaigns covering earned, owned, and paid media. He has also executed various award-winning campaigns for brand awareness and demand generation.
Cashfree co-founder Reeju Datta said, “We are delighted to welcome Vaibhav onboard as the head of our marketing team at Cashfree. He joins us at a time when the fintech industry and Cashfree are going through massive disruptions. His understanding of the B2B business will help define strategic roadmaps and deploy marketing solutions for Cashfree”.
Mehrotra said, “I am elated to join Cashfree, especially at an exciting juncture in the company’s growth journey. Fintech has truly emerged as one of the leading growth drivers in the country and across the globe. I am truly excited about building and supporting our growth and the continued improvements we are making in the payments space. This is an exciting time to join this innovative and vision-led organization.
Brands
Samsung certifies 1,000 Maharashtra students in AI and coding
The South Korean electronics giant marks its first large-scale skilling push in the state, with women making up nearly half the national programme’s enrolment
PUNE: Samsung has put 1,000 students in Maharashtra through a certified training programme in artificial intelligence and coding, the largest such drive the South Korean electronics company has run in the state and a signal that corporate India’s skilling ambitions are moving well beyond the boardroom brochure.
The certifications were awarded under Samsung Innovation Campus (SIC), the company’s flagship corporate social responsibility programme, which launched in India in 2022 with the stated aim of democratising access to future-technology education. The 1,000 graduates were drawn from four institutions: 127 from Savitribai Phule Pune University, 373 from Pimpri Chinchwad University, 250 from D.Y. Patil University’s Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology and 250 from Anjuman-I-Islam’s Kalsekar Technical Campus. All completed training in either AI or coding and programming, the two disciplines Samsung has identified as the critical pillars of the digital economy.
The programme does not stop at technical training. Soft-skills development and career-readiness modules are baked into the curriculum, a deliberate attempt to close the gap between what universities teach and what employers actually want.
“India’s digital growth story will ultimately be shaped by the quality of its talent pipeline,” said Shubham Mukherjee, head of CSR and corporate communications at Samsung Southwest Asia. “As technologies like AI move from the periphery to the core of industries, skilling must evolve from basic training to building real-world capability. This milestone in Maharashtra reflects how industry and academia can come together to create a future-ready workforce that is both globally competitive and locally relevant.”
The Maharashtra drive sits within a rapidly scaling national effort. Samsung Innovation Campus trained 20,000 young people across India in 2025, hitting its stated target for the year. Women account for 48 per cent of national enrolments, a figure the company cites as evidence of its push for an inclusive technology ecosystem. The programme is implemented in partnership with the Electronics Sector Skills Council of India and the Telecom Sector Skill Council.
Samsung, which is marking 30 years in India this year, runs SIC alongside two other initiatives, Samsung Solve for Tomorrow and Samsung DOST, as part of a broader effort to build what it calls a generation of innovators with both the technical depth and the problem-solving mindset to thrive in a fast-moving digital world.
A thousand certified students is a tidy headline. Whether they find jobs that match their new skills is the harder question, and the one that will ultimately determine whether corporate skilling programmes like this one are genuine pipelines or well-photographed gestures.
