Paulo Almeida Chief Technology Officer, Neso Brands

Company

Neso Brands is creating a tech-augmented house of global eyewear brands, enabling the most promising direct-to-consumer brands across the world to become brands of the future. They are scale enablers, investing in and augmenting the capabilities of eyewear brands with strong traction. Neso Brands find and fund not only diverse eyewear brands, but also innovative software companies working to advance eyewear, unified by global ambitions – to transform the way people see and experience the world.

Founded in early-2022 and based in Singapore, Neso Brands is backed by Lenskart and its investors, including KKR, Temasek, ADIA, and Softbank. In May 2022, Neso Brands raised $100M in their first funding round to enable them to partner with and invest in consumer eyewear brands globally and grow them by leveraging synergies across the Lenskart Group. At the same time, Neso Brands appointed Bjorn Bergstrom, an experienced D2C executive that most recently served as Chief Growth Officer for global fashion brand NA-KD, as Founding CEO.

Search Background

As Neso Brands embarks on this journey of transforming the way people see and experience the world, they were looking to bring on board a Head of Technology reporting to the Founding CEO, Bjorn Bergstrom. While this role would evolve over time as Neso acquires and partners with brands to form part of their portfolio, in summary the Head of Technology will be tasked with leading tech and engineering, playing a key role in the senior leadership team, and building out world-class omnichannel experiences for consumers around the world.

Requirements

Given that Neso Brands is in its early stages, they were looking for someone who would be excited by the prospect of building the organisation’s central tech and engineering capabilities. Furthermore, the early-stage nature of the role meant that the scope for impact was massive, covering operational and strategic aspects.

Though e-commerce has become a common focus for business, Neso Brands takes an omnichannel approach so the ideal candidate would have a strong understanding of building online and in-store experiences.

Result

After an extensive pan-European and APAC, Neso Brands appointed Paulo Almeida who had been serving as CTO for Rabbit Care, a Series C Thailand-based FinTech. Paulo is a strategic and tactical technology leader that brings significant omnichannel experience from his time at Pomelo Fashion, one of Asia’s retail success stories.