SEA martech firm Involve Asia appoints former CtrlShift CEO as president

Southeast Asian martech platform Involve Asia has appointed digital marketing veteran, Rene Menezes, as president. Menezes was most recently director of the Southeast Asia partner office of SimilarWeb and former CEO of CtrlShift.He will be leading the commercial development of the organisation and will work in tandem with CEO and founder Jimmy How to manage the company and its stakeholders.

He has over 25 years of leadership experience and has worked with companies including Yahoo!, MSN, Facebook, Waze, Spotify, BBC, ESPN, and Disney. Menezes has also been a board member of Involve Asia over the past eight years. With the appointment, Involve Asia is strengthening its management team at its headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, off the back of three years of growth and profitability. It now serves over 4,000 brands and matches them to a pool of 350,000 partners, generating over US$1.4 billion in sales since its launch in 2014.

Menezes said: “Since the pandemic began, there has been a surge in e-commerce adoption across Southeast Asia. The market is going to see a more aggressive Involve Asia acquire new clients as the pool of potential customers which can benefit from our services has grown exponentially.”

Meanwhile, How said Menezes has advised the business since its inception and has been able to lend counsel through some challenging decisions and helped the company take actions that had a lasting positive impact on the company. "I’m excited to have him in the trenches beside me as we charge forward to build on our recent performance with far more aggressive goals for the short and mid-term," How added.

Founded in 2014, Involve Asia has been backed by major venture capital firms such as 500 Startups, OSK Technology Ventures, and Cradle Seed Ventures and has an established presence across Asia with offices in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand.