Dhruv Dhawan moves on from The Trade Desk

Dhruv Dhawan is stepping away from The Trade Desk, closing a sixteen month chapter as vice president revenue during which he was responsible for business development, client partnerships and revenue management for the company’s India business. For an executive who has spent two decades hopping between telecom, consulting and big tech, the exit is less a surprise than a natural pause point, the kind senior operators take when a mandate has run its course and a bigger one beckons elsewhere.

Dhawan’s career reads like a masterclass in riding India’s digital transformation from the inside. Nearly a decade at Google saw him rise through industry lead roles across telecom, financial services, FMCG and CPG, culminating in a stint leading the FMCG and CPG D2C business for Google India, where he worked closely with the country’s largest consumer brands on digital strategy. Before Google, he cut his teeth at Bharti Airtel across multiple stints spanning M2M and enterprise solutions, new product development in mobile entertainment, and even a period as executive assistant to the executive director, giving him a rare vantage point into both operational detail and boardroom strategy. A stint at Accenture in between sharpened his consulting chops on projects ranging from mobile application stores to market entry strategy for a Japanese gaming company.

More recently, Dhawan headed ads at Disney+ Hotstar, one of India’s largest OTT platforms, where he ran sales, strategy, go to market, content solutions and ad tech operations, before the merger with Viacom18 saw him take on building the markets organisation for the newly combined entity. That breadth, telecom infrastructure, management consulting, big tech advertising and streaming media, is precisely what The Trade Desk was buying when it brought him on board in April 2025 to lead its India revenue charge in a market where programmatic advertising is still finding its feet against the dominance of walled gardens.

What happens next will be closely watched. Executives with Dhawan’s résumé, equal parts Google pedigree, Airtel operational grit and Hotstar’s streaming scale, do not stay on the market long, and India’s adtech and media industry is short on leaders who have genuinely worked across the full stack, from telecom infrastructure through to platform advertising. Wherever he lands next, the smart money says it will be a role that leans hard on exactly that combination.