Chitra Nayak

Chitra Nayak has 25+ years of experience across companies spanning technology, financial services, and management consulting. Currently she serves on the boards of Infosys (INFY: IT services), ForwardAir (FWRD: trucking), LifeWorks (LWRK: wellbeing and health services), Invitae (NVTA: medical genetics/genomics), and Intercom. Chitra also advises tech startups. Formerly she was COO running Go-To-Market at Comfy, a real-estate tech startup in the machine learning and IoT space, that was acquired by Siemens. Before this, she was COO at Funding Circle, an online SMB lending marketplace that went public in 2018.

She was at Salesforce for eight years, as COO Platform focused on Go-To-Market for the Platform business unit, and as Senior Vice President of Sales Development, where she led a global team of 500+ focused on prospecting for new business. She also led marketing programs. 

Before Salesforce, Chitra was Vice President of Membership Product Management for AAA Northern California, responsible for the $250M P&L for Membership, and for acquiring, retaining, and cross-selling the 4 million membership base. Her past roles include running Sales Strategy & Operations at Charles Schwab, and driving strategy and process enhancement for companies across industry sectors at the Boston Consulting Group, a global management consulting firm.

Chitra was the founder and executive sponsor for FemmeForce, also known as the Salesforce Women’s Network initiative. More recently, Chitra has co-founded Neythri.org, a South Asian women’s professional network. She also co-created and taught a Women in Leadership MBA class at California State University.

Chitra has an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, an M.S. in Engineering from Cornell University, and a B.S. in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology.