Kennect Appoints Puneet Gupta as Chief Business Officer to Lead Its Next Phase of Scale

VMPL
Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], September 3: Kennect, the incentive compensation management and sales performance management company, today announced the appointment of Puneet Gupta as Chief Business Officer. Gupta will own the company's commercial engine across sales, marketing and partnerships, and will lead capital strategy as Kennect scales. He joins Pulkit Agrawal, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, and Pralok Chhajed, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer.
Former IndiaMART Vice President of Strategic Planning and Investor Relations, and FieldAssist Chief Operating Officer, will own the commercial engine and capital strategy as the sales performance management and incentive compensation company builds toward category leadership
The mandate is deliberate in both scope and ambition: take annual recurring revenue to Rs 100 crore by March 2029, compound that expansion profitably rather than by buying growth, and build the financial and operating rigour a company requires before it approaches public markets. It is a mandate written for capital efficiency as much as for scale.
The appointment arrives at a point of category expansion. Every enterprise running a field force or a channel partner network pays out incentives, and close to half of organisations still calculate those payouts on spreadsheets, according to research published by Business Research Insights in 2025.
Gartner has separately found that under a quarter of sellers clearly understand how their incentives are calculated when spreadsheets are involved - an incentive a representative cannot follow has stopped doing its work.
Kennect grew up in Indian life sciences, where compensation plans run to dozens of variables, field forces number in the thousands, and audit trails are a regulatory requirement rather than a preference. Customers including Sanofi, Cipla, Zydus, Lupin, AstraZeneca, Lonza and Oaknet run incentives on the platform. The company now holds close to 10 per cent of the pharmaceuticals and life sciences market it serves, and has expanded from that foundation into FMCG, banking and insurance across India and APAC.
Growth and governance sit at two ends of the same string. Pull either too hard and the other slackens: plans that chase volume outrun their controls, and controls that tighten too far quietly tax the field. Kennect's proposition is that the balance is engineerable, and that when it holds, governance stops being a cost of doing business and starts funding the growth it was thought to constrain - turning incentive spend from a line item to be minimised into an investment that returns.
That conviction is expressed in the company's operating idea and its tagline: Comply. Compound. Coach. Compliance lays the foundation - transparent plans, governed data, calculation an auditor can follow. Compounding is what that foundation makes possible: each quarter opens ahead of the one before it rather than level with it. Coach, an AI-first layer, converts top-performer behaviour into daily habit across the field force through prompts delivered in the flow of work. The third move feeds the first, and what began as a governance investment becomes a self-running growth engine.
Gupta joins Kennect with a record that is financial as much as commercial. A member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, he has spent over two decades across IndiaMART InterMESH, British Telecom, Religare Enterprises, SMC Global Securities and FIITJEE. At IndiaMART he served as Vice President, Strategic Planning and Investor Relations, where he was central to the company's initial public offering, which raised approximately Rs 475 crore at a valuation close to Rs 2,800 crore. Within two years of listing, he helped execute a qualified institutional placement that raised a further Rs 1,100 crore - the sequence of a company that earned its access to public capital and then used it.
His remit expanded into corporate development, where Gupta led more than 15 investments totalling roughly Rs 1,120 crore into companies including Fleetx, EasyEcom, Zimyo, Busy Infotech, Legistify and M1Xchange, alongside two acquisitions valued at approximately Rs 625 crore. He was also a shareholder in Shipway, the post-purchase automation platform in which Unicommerce acquired full ownership in March 2025, and played an instrumental role in that transaction at a valuation of close to Rs 200 crore.
Immediately prior to joining Kennect, he served as Chief Operating Officer at FieldAssist, the route-to-market platform used by CPG brands across a dozen markets, where topline revenue grew several times over during an 18-month tenure.
The move extends a career spent close to the field. Route-to-market software directs a field force. Incentive compensation determines its motivation. Gupta's appointment takes him one layer deeper into the same problem, and into a category where the winner is decided by depth rather than reach.
“I have spent two decades assessing software businesses, and the ones worth backing tend to look like this: founders who have compounded quietly for years, customers who renew because the product earns it, and a market considerably larger than current revenue reflects,” said Puneet Gupta, Chief Business Officer, Kennect. “Pulkit and Pralok have built Kennect over nine years with unusual capital discipline, and I share their conviction that profitability and scale move together rather than against each other. When I spoke to Kennect's customers, what came back was not satisfaction with features but trust in the team, which tells you where this company puts its attention. The platform touches the earnings of more than 2,50,000 people today. In pharmaceuticals and life sciences we hold close to 10 per cent of the market; this is a horizontal product, and the same playbook now travels to automotive, manufacturing, CPG, BFSI and consumer durables.” – Puneet Gupta, CBO
“The timing of Puneet's arrival matters as much as the appointment itself,” said Pulkit Agrawal, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Kennect. “We have product-market fit and we are already on a growth curve. What changes now is the rate. Puneet has scaled operations, set strategy and raised capital in both private and public markets, and that combination is what amplifies a good trajectory into the one our ambitions require. The market waiting to be solved for is considerably larger than what any vendor in this category currently serves.” – Pulkit Agarwal, CEO
“Three Ps now complete the picture,” said Pralok Chhajed, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, Kennect. “We built Kennect for the accounts other platforms decline: thousands of representatives, plans that change mid-quarter, auditors who ask to see the working. Puneet arrives with a proven record in strategy and growth, and I am confident we compound this business several times over from here.” – Pralok Chhajed, COO
About Kennect
Kennect is an incentive compensation management and sales performance management platform built for complex, distributed enterprise sales organisations. It automates incentive calculation and payout across field forces, dealers and channel partners, giving finance a single governed record of every rupee committed and paid. Every representative sees earnings and next best action in real time. Leadership gets the governance layer that keeps plans compliant, auditable and defensible at inspection.
Above that sits a self-learning coaching model. It reads outcomes across the field force, identifies which behaviours precede quota attainment in a given territory or plan, and surfaces those patterns to managers and representatives as they work. The model sharpens with each cycle it observes, so improvement accrues instead of resetting - which is what turns a governance layer into a compounding growth engine. Kennect integrates with leading CRM, ERP and HRMS systems and serves customers across pharmaceuticals, FMCG, BFSI, insurance and manufacturing in India and APAC. Founded in 2017 by Pulkit Agrawal and Pralok Chhajed, the company is headquartered in Mumbai. Learn more at https://www.kennect.io
Media Contact
Kennect Inc.
info@kennect.io  | 9015914343
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