MAM
Infloouhnser floats influencer marketing agency The Sway
KOLKATA: Infloouhnser Pvt Ltd has launched a trust-building and transparent multi-layered influencer advertising and marketing agency, The Sway.
The Sway combines data and technology with creative strategy and organic distribution to give brands a compelling offering while prioritizing integrity, accountability, and transparency. The core focus of the agency will be influencer marketing, meme marketing, and technology experiences.
The company, floated by Shailendra Shetty, Rajneil R Kamath, and Karan Sahni, has tied up with the Israel-based LDRS group, one of the global pioneers in the influencer marketing business, to use their AI and ML tech platform, enabling advertisers to discover influencers and define the audience to make it more meaningful for a brand to collaborate. The software also allows the client to identify and weed out fake followers and bots, help real-time engagement metrics tracking, ensure standardised metrics and pricing, selection, and matching of the influencer to deliver value over volumes.
The company has also got into an exclusive partnership with Meme Chat, pioneers of meme culture in India, reaching over 300 million social media users, thereby helping brands to unlock the value of memes with organic distribution on social media. This includes augmented reality (AR) effects and filters, brand bots, microsites, and games. Having built an in-house data science team to slice and dice data, The Sway has the advantage of creating the most optimal mix of creators and social media destinations for brands.
The company has roped in Jyoti Bansal (ex-CEO PHD India) and Namrata Tata (managing partner, House of Cheer) to help mentor and advise the company in its journey.
The Sway founder Shailendra Shetty said: "The recent case of fake followers' scam that got busted makes services of our kind much needed. The authenticity of influencers and audience is crucial to any brand. We help our brand partners sift through influencers' universe and connect them with content creators who share the same value and beliefs as the brand. Combined with meme marketing, we are able to give advertisers a great way to reach out to Gen Z and millennial users. "
LDRS group CEO Eran Nizri said: "We are excited to partner with Rajniel, Shailendra, Karan and the team at SWAY. Their decades of experience in media, technology, and marketing to blend content marketing with technology to create experiences that augment influencer and meme marketing makes them the perfect partner for us as we make an entry into the Indian marketplace.”
Influencer marketing is proving to be the fastest-growing method for brands to acquire high-quality customers. By industry estimates, brands are set to spend up to 10-15 per cent of the overall Rs 14,000 crore of digital advertising revenue on influencer marketing. Many sectors, including ed-tech, FMCGs, and fintech, have seen a 20 to 30 per cent rise in influencer marketing spends during the last six months and are expected to grow even more.
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.
