Jul 2024 – Present · 1 yr 8 mos · New York, United States

• Firstwork helps companies hire essential workers 5x faster and cheaper - with full compliance and zero manual ops.
• We built this because frontline hiring is stuck in the stone age. Workers wait days - sometimes weeks - to get cleared. Ops teams chase documents across inboxes. Compliance breaks, and nobody knows until it’s too late.
• Most businesses still rely on bloated back offices or outsourced BPOs to keep things moving. But that just buries the problem under headcount.
• Firstwork replaces all of it with AI agents - tools that handle onboarding, credential checks, right-to-work, and compliance automatically, from day one.
• The results speak. One customer cut time-to-hire from 10 days to 12 hours. Another told us: “We reallocated the whole ops team somewhere else. Firstwork just runs.”
• We're backed by Y Combinator, Google, Palantir and more. If you want to move faster, stay compliant, and scale without bloat - we should talk. I'm at vardhan@firstwork.com

Jan 2024 – Present · 2 yrs 2 mos

Jan 2020 – Jan 2024 · 4 yrs · Singapore, Australia, New Zealand

• As Head of Region, APAC I was the company's first hire in the APAC region, and was the CEO of Remitly Singapore/Board Director for various Remitly APAC boards.
• I oversaw the P&L for the APAC business from the ground up to high eight-figure USD ARR, with single-threaded-ownership of Singapore, Australia, China, India, New Zealand and Japan.
• Responsible for hiring and building the team in the region. Oversaw commercial, governance, marketing and product decisions. Including innovative new products for maritime and other frontline industries.
• Remitly currently processes ~$40bn USD in annual send volume, generating ~$1bn USD in annual revenue. Remitly IPOd on the NASDAQ in September 2021 at a valuation >USD $7Bn.
• Other details include: Growing regional payment volumes to >$2.5 billion USD, leading the company's first M&A globally in Japan, and launching new markets across Asia Pacific.

Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 · 2 yrs · Singapore

• Deliveroo is one of the UK's highest valued startups, founded in 2013 it currently has offices in 13 countries, it was the FT's fastest growing company of 2017 and 2018. Deliveroo Singapore saw $45mn in revenues as of FY2018, growing 70% YoY.
• Head of Business Strategy -
• In my role as the Business Strategy Head for Singapore I led the overall strategic development for the business in Singapore; reporting directly to the GM and working cross-functionality on issues of competition, financial analysis, profitability and special projects, including launching and administering new products regionally.
• Sustainability Committee Founding Member -
• As a founding member of the Global Sustainability Committee I led projects on understanding ways of promoting sustainable diets on platform, assessing ways of reducing single use plastic waste, analysing ways of minimising food waste, and developing e-vehicle solutions to prevent transport emissions. In addition, I successfully launched an initiative to remove shark-fin soup from platform globally.
• Media for selected projects I've worked on below:

Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 · 3 yrs

• Monitor Group was founded in 1983 by six leading academics based at Harvard Business School, including Michael Porter, Mark B. Fuller, and Joseph B. Fuller. It was acquired by Deloitte to become Monitor Deloitte.
• Consistently ranked in the top 10% of performers firm-wide and awarded early promotions.
• Worked in strategy projects covering a range of geographies (including the UK, GCC, Russia and China) and industries dealing with: Innovation and Entrepreneurship/Economic Development/Technology & Media/ eCommerce.
• Led development of eminence work on technology and governance.

Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 · 2 yrs

• Hippo.Rocks was a tech-consulting hybrid that aimed to use technology to track happiness in employees and analyse that data to establish what makes people unhappy. The aim was to allow companies to attract, inspire and retain top talent in their companies.
• As Head of Business Development my responsibilities were:
• Conducting in-depth market entry analysis.
• Developing a business plan.
• Engaging in product development.
• Arranging meeting with senior individuals across industries to get insight into organisational development and corporate psychology.

Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 · 0 mo

• Developing internal firm strategy for Sub-Saharan African expansion by performing in-depth quantitative analysis of macroeconomic growth trends and consumer spending patterns in SSA markets worth over $600bn.
• Collaborating with senior staff across offices to generate a holistic market expansion strategy based on aforementioned external data coupled with internal firm goals.
• Analysing business and geopolitical events across EMEA. Summarising developments relevant to the firm’s EMEA FID dealings into a one page daily report.
• Delivered a full analysis of a $50m hotel expansion investment proposal.