LinkedIn appoints Pulse’s Akshay Kothari as India country manager

Professional networking platform LinkedIn today appointed Akshay Kothari as Country Manager for India, with immediate effect.

Kothari replaces Nishant Rao, who quit the company in October last year to join Freshdesk, a cloud-based customer support software, as its Chief Operating Officer.

LinkedIn, which has more than 400 million members globally, has one of the largest userbase from India. Kothari will report to Olivier Legrand, LinkedIn's Managing Director for the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, and join the company's APAC senior management team. He joined LinkedIn in 2013 when Pulse, the company he co-founded was acquired by LinkedIn.

Kothari has been based out of based out of LinkedIn's global headquarters in Mountain View, California, where he has led several major product and content initiatives, including Pulse.

He also played an important role in boosting the number of members publishing on LinkedIn from 1,000 to nearly 2 million in the last two years.