Strengthening Konovo’s India Expansion: Purple Quarter Leads Sr. DOE Search

Introduction

Formed in 2019, Konovo (formerly Apollo Intelligence) is a PE-owned, US-based parent company of three leading healthcare market research brands: InCrowd, Survey Healthcare Global, and GlocalMind. Konovo is modernizing the path to health insights through technology, enabling global healthcare organizations to accelerate discovery, refine solutions, and bring life-changing innovations to market faster. By integrating deep stakeholder access, tech-enabled analytics, and healthcare domain expertise, Konovo delivers real-time insights that power timely and informed decisions across the health discovery lifecycle.

Problem Statement

As part of its strategic expansion, Konovo aimed to strengthen its engineering presence in India by hiring a Sr. Director of Engineering. The mandate required a leader capable of building and scaling high-performing teams, driving both new and existing product initiatives, and ensuring robust, scalable, and customer-centric engineering outcomes. The ideal leader needed strong technical depth, mature people management skills, and experience operating across both Indian and US environments; critical for navigating compensation expectations, cultural nuances, and distributed team dynamics. Konovo also preferred a relatively young leader to align with the average team age while still having the experience to influence long-term engineering and business outcomes.

Execution & Solution

Purple Quarter conducted a targeted search, focusing on candidates with hands-on expertise, global exposure, and proven team-building capabilities. Among the profiles presented, Naveenkumar Sanjeevi emerged as the best match. With 12+ years at Groupon, he demonstrated strong execution capability, experience in scaled environments, and the maturity to lead Konovo’s India engineering charter. Through our Behavioural Metrics Model (BMM), Naveenkumar was identified as a Creator-Nurturer blend; well-suited to build India operations from the ground up while fostering the culture and capability required to scale. Further, we supported both Konovo and the candidate with advisory inputs. This included compensation benchmarking to bridge US-India market differences and guidance throughout the interview and negotiation stages to ensure clarity and alignment on expectations.

Looking Forward

With Naveenkumar’s appointment, Konovo is positioned to accelerate its engineering expansion in India and strengthen its global product roadmap.

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