# Saurav Patro

Product leader. Marketplaces, partner platforms, incentive design, commercial workflows and LLM products.
Based in Dubai, UAE. Open to relocation.
Contact: saurav.patr@gmail.com · LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/saurav-patro-a2164330

## Summary

Ten years building marketplaces from the inside, on every side: the platform side at Careem, the seller side at Amazon, the delivery-partner side at Zomato, a three-sided travel marketplace at Travel Triangle, a two-currency game economy at Hike, and B2B logistics billing at Delhivery. Builds the rails, the incentives on top of them, and the measurement that shows whether each side is winning. Ships LLM products and builds with Claude Code.

## Roles

| Dates | Company | Title |
|---|---|---|
| Mar 2024 to present | Careem (MENA super-app, 50M+ users) | Lead Product Manager, New Bets (AI & Enterprise) |
| Apr 2023 to Jan 2024 | Zealth.club | Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder |
| Apr 2022 to Mar 2023 | Hike | VP, Chief of Staff to CEO |
| Dec 2020 to Apr 2022 | Amazon | Product Leader, Seller Growth & Quick Commerce |
| Sep 2018 to Dec 2020 | Zomato | Group Product Manager, Online Ordering |
| Jun 2017 to Jul 2018 | Travel Triangle | Product Leader, Customer Experience |
| Dec 2015 to Jun 2017 | Delhivery | Manager, Business Operations (among the first 30 employees) |

Education: MBA, XLRI Jamshedpur (2013 to 2015, top 5%). BBA, Central University of Jharkhand (2009 to 2012, top 1%); founded Unnayan, free tuition for 7,000+ village students.

## Case studies

### Careem Tenants (partner platform)
- Third-party businesses plug into Careem Pay, discovery, the design system and the customer funnel; fulfilment stays with the partner. Vetting and agreed commercials gate listing.
- 20+ partners in Dubai, 15 in Jordan, 7 in Egypt within six months.
- Careem grew from about 5% of partner business at launch to about 96% of a car-rental partner's GTV and about 92% of a home-services partner's.
- Customers who adopted a partner service tripled app spend (45%+ of adopters).
- Lasting partnerships include Justlife (home services) and Washmen (laundry).
- Car-rental partner Swapp: inherited a strained partnership (live since 2022), rebuilt the joint roadmap within six months, proved the new model with a proof of concept, then closed an exclusivity deal with equity for Careem, its first stake in a partner app (publicly announced 2025).

### Careem for Business (B2B, zero to one)
- Signal: month-end support tickets for tax invoices (agent-only tickets rose to about 70% in the last five days of the month).
- Research: 15+ users across three markets; employer reimbursement of 20 to 40 trips and orders a month; real-estate agents as a key segment.
- Validation: fake-door page built on Lovable; 200+ interest forms from about 70 companies in two weeks.
- Product: admin workspace with per-service spend policies and employee lists; company-funded preloaded wallet with daily-expiring allowances; "pay as business" at checkout.
- Go to market: sold the first accounts personally; $200K a month in revenue three months after launch; then handed to a sales team and the commercial org.
- North star: new business accounts; revenue as output.

### AI grocery list (LLM product)
- Photo, pasted WhatsApp list, or voice agent. V1 used human transcribers as the baseline; the LLM shipped after matching it.
- 40-click weekly shop to about 3 clicks. 22% week-one adoption against a 5 to 7% target; 65% repeat within two weeks; adopter order value about 70 to about 250 AED.
- Refused a big-basket discount; used country-of-origin tags to anchor quality.

### AI Enablement (Careem)
- Ask Careem: retrieval assistant over Confluence, Notion and Drive in Slack, raising Jira tickets; actions validated on a shadow replica of production; about 98% accuracy after rollout.
- Up to 80% of commercial and operations workflows run through AI; merchant onboarding 6 days to 1; merchant revenue +24% from AI merchant tooling and dynamic pricing.
- Published an analysis skill on Careem's internal skill marketplace.

### Zealth (co-founder and CPO, health-records network)
- Consent-based health-records layer on India's ABHA rails; one of the first five companies admitted to the government sandbox.
- Five partner groups: government (ABHA sandbox), insurers, hospital chains (8 hospitals in the pilot), diagnostic labs (reports delivered into the record), private clinics (40 in the pilot).
- Products: longitudinal record with time-limited consent for patients; patient-history and reach-out tool for doctors and labs.
- Pilot earned revenue; shut down when the government deprioritised ABHA.

### Hike (game economy)
- Two-currency economy; pay-to-play loop converting 8% of new users to paid monthly; Rush VIP tiers raised spend 30% and D30 retention from 12% to 30%.
- $100M in recurring revenue, profitable from day one; led a 230-person team through the pivot.

### Amazon (seller side)
- Mobile-first seller onboarding for micro-sellers behind 80% of India volume; $130M incremental revenue.
- Top Brands trust signal: D2C brand revenue +200% at 3% higher conversion. Quality engine on 30+ signals cut returns 25%.

### Zomato (fulfilment engine and incentives)
- North star "shutdown" (time the app showed nothing deliverable) driven toward zero.
- Built a 90K-cyclist fleet from zero: 43% of orders at 50% lower cost; cost per order about ₹120 to about ₹78.
- Rebuilt assignment (multimodal), partner profiles, payouts; guardrails for women riders and riders with disabilities; first delivery-partner insurance.
- Payouts rebuilt in six phases, ending with cohort-level rate cards for groups as small as 10 riders; part-time rate cards.
- First promotion platform: automatic offer stacking in one cart and a targetable platform-fee structure.
- Karma Score fraud system cut abuse 90%; dynamic pricing improved margins 18%; 250-city P&L from -20% to +16% EBITDA.

### Travel Triangle (three-sided marketplace)
- Travellers, local travel agents and on-ground providers. Repeat was about 5% over nearly five years.
- Referral reward mechanism and loyalty rewards; north star of trips per converted traveller (about 20 per conversion).
- Weekend getaways drew 90% of repeat travellers and 40% of revenue within six months.
- Lead scoring on 25+ attributes improved lead-to-conversion 23%.

### Delhivery
- DMiles prepaid wallet for long-tail B2B shippers: $3M unrealised revenue recovered, leakage -95%.
- AddFix address-resolution engine, later offered to Amazon as a service.

## Built personally
- Cubby: baby-care app on Firebase with per-baby access controls.
- Journey Log: fitness web app on Cloudflare Pages.
- Claude skills: Product Board venture review, competitive app teardown.