Ms. Kausalya Nandakumar is the CEO of SmartShift, the first intrapreneurial venture funded by the Mahindra group. She led the company through its conceptualisation and was designated its CEO at the age of 35, becoming the youngest CEO in the federation of Mahindra group.

With an MBA in marketing from Narsee Monjee, Kausalya joined the Mahindra group under the prestigious Young Leaders program that grooms talent early-on for management positions. In her 10 years with the Mahindra group, she has worked across sectors, functions and geographies, giving her a holistic view of the organization. Her excellent track record as the head of corporate sales for North zone, her brand stint with the highly successful XUV500 and her instrumental role in deploying strategic imperatives across the various business verticals, got her noticed by the senior leadership and put her on the fast-track to success.

In her last role with Automotive Strategy at Mahindra, while debating the “next big idea for commercial vehicle industry”, Kausalya put forward the idea of a technology-based aggregator in this space. She then led a team, in a heavily male-dominated space, through six months of rigorous efforts of meeting customers, identifying their pain points and developing in granular detail every aspect of the business plan. Her efforts got recognized when the start-up was evangelized by none other than Mr. Anand Mahindra himself, and SmartShift was launched in October of 2015.

SmartShift is a tech-marketplace for intra-city logistics that enables cargo owners to find the right transporters through a mobile application. In a span of just 8 months, SmartShift is operational in two cities (Mumbai & Hyderabad), with close to a thousand transporter partners enrolled on the platform; successfully simplifying intra city logistics for hundreds of cargo owners on a daily basis, and all this with a lean team  size of twenty odd employees. Driven with the ambition of bringing about significant efficiencies in the unorganized logistics space, and led by a strong leader with a penchant for creating and executing innovative ideas for the future, Kausalya’s SmartShift is poised towards disrupting cargo movement across the country.