Honasa Consumer, the company behind Mamaearth, has elevated Vipul Maheshwari to chief product and technology officer, effective October 23, 2026. Maheshwari was previously executive vice president of product and data, and has been part of the company’s senior management team.
In the new role he will oversee product, technology, engineering and analytics. The company said the mandate is to push its AI-led transformation and build agentic AI systems that can execute multi-step workflows with human oversight.
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Why an internal promotion matters
Maheshwari has spent six years building Honasa’s data and product capabilities. That history matters more than the title change. The company has grown through acquisitions and now runs a portfolio of brands. It needs one person who can see the same customer data across all of them.
Honasa runs seven beauty and personal care brands, including Mamaearth, The Derma Co, BBlunt and Aqualogica. Each brand was built on digital-first distribution. Each one collects its own first-party data. Turning that into a single view of the customer is a product problem before it is a marketing one.
Before Honasa, Maheshwari worked at Delhivery and Global Analytics India. He holds a master’s degree in mathematics and computer science from IIT Delhi. That background points to the work the company is asking for. It is quantitative and systems-heavy, not campaign-led.
The AI push is the real story
The company plans to build AI-powered tools that automate tasks, improve operational efficiency and speed up decision-making across its brands. It is also exploring agentic AI systems, which can run multi-step workflows and coordinate with human teams.
For a beauty and personal care business, the obvious use cases sit in demand forecasting, inventory planning, content production and customer support. Honasa sells through marketplaces, quick commerce, its own D2C channels and offline retail. Each channel has different forecasting behaviour, and getting assortment wrong is expensive in a category where shelf life and seasonality matter.
The harder question is whether agentic AI changes the cost structure or just the speed of the same work. Most consumer companies have automated individual steps already. The gain comes when an agent can take a forecast through to a purchase order and a creator brief without handoffs.
What the numbers say
Honasa has had a stronger run this financial year. Revenue from operations rose 27% year on year to Rs 678.8 crore in the June 2026 quarter, according to the company’s results. Profit grew sharply. The company’s September quarter update pointed to high-teens net sales value growth for Mamaearth and faster growth from its younger brands.
The complexity he has to absorb
That combination is what makes the technology mandate urgent. If Mamaearth is growing in high-teens and the smaller brands are growing faster, the operational load spreads across more SKUs, more channels and more content. A single product and technology leader with visibility across brands is how companies try to absorb that complexity without adding headcount.
What to watch
Three things will show whether the elevation changes anything beyond an org chart. The first is whether Honasa discloses measurable outcomes from its AI work, such as forecasting accuracy or marketing cost per rupee of revenue, rather than describing initiatives.
The second is hiring. A chief product and technology officer with a mandate this broad needs engineering depth under him, and the company has not said how many people it plans to add.
The third is whether the agentic systems reach customer-facing work or stay inside operations. Automation of internal workflows is safer and easier to measure. Customer-facing agents carry brand risk in a category where trust in the product is the entire moat.
For now, the appointment is a signal about sequencing. Honasa is putting product, data and technology under one leader at a point when its growth depends on running seven brands without seven back offices.