MAM
Mullen Lintas wins creative business of Motlilal Oswal
MUMBAI: India’s leading financial services company, Motilal Oswal Financial Services has appointed Mullen Lintas Mumbai as its creative agency. The agency was chosen after a multi-agency pitch.
As part of the mandate, apart from delivering solutions on conventional mediums like TV, Print, Radio and OOH, Mullen Lintas Mumbai will also provide strategic recommendations and creative ideas for the digital and social space.
Commenting on the appointment, Motilal Oswal marketing director Ramnik Chhabra said, “Mullen Lintas managed to creatively interpret our communication brief with simplicity and impact. Important parameters while communicating in a category with low penetration and awareness.”
The win marks Mullen Lintas’ foray into the financial services sector. Launched about a year-and-a-half ago in India, the agency has been having a brilliant run over the past few months with multiple new business wins across key markets of Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. This win marks another important milestone for the agency in the current financial quarter after it recently won the new business mandate of Tata CliQ and Too Yumm!
Speaking of the win, Mullen Lintas chairman & CCO Amer Jaleel said: “Motilal Oswal is a large enterprise that’s founded on strong principles. And the simplicity with which they approach financial services is quite impressive. When we met the people behind this inspiring organisation we were really thrilled by their childlike enthusiasm towards the advertising idea that we had proposed. Their reaction and response pretty much sums up our campaign premise. You’ll soon get to see some really clutter breaking work.”
Expressing his views on the win, Mullen Lintas Virat Tandon CEO said, “Everyone knows that Motilal Oswal are the best at what they do – making money for their clients. But, what we also realised in the pitch process was that they are also very good at understanding and buying good creative work. Their brief was very clear and I guess we gave them an idea that they believe will make money for them. We are very excited on winning this mandate.”
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.
