LeEco ropes in Qualcomm exec Jaiteerth Patwari for its LeMall

NEW DELHI: Chinese internet conglomerate LeEco, formerly LeTV, has announced the appointment of Qualcomm’s Jaiteerth Patwari as R&D head of its e-commerce division LeMall India. Patwari will set up and head the development centre.

Patwari was with Qualcomm for past 14 years, where he developed patents for innovations related to content monetization and distribution. He is known for rolling out the world’s first Qualcomm mobile application store and messaging products. At LeEco, his responsibility will be to develop the e-commerce business of LeEco.


Going forward, LeMall R&D is looking to hire 50 more engineers with the skills to build “highly-scalable distributed e-commerce platform”. “In the next couple of months, we will look at aggressively scaling up operations for LeMall in India,” said Patwari.

LeEco India is headquartered in Bengaluru and has ove 200 employees. The company aims to become over 1000 people-strong by the end of 2016.

LeEco is looking at setting up 5-10 flagship stores in key cities within the next 3-6 months of getting the approvals.The company has already filed an application with the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) seeking approval for opening single brand retail shops in the country.

Recently, it bought 11% shares of telecommunications equipment company Coolpad, to become its largest shareholder with a total 28.9% shares.