Jana CFO Amy Spurling is the latest of several high-level employees to leave the Boston mobile Internet company, BostInno has learned. Her departure comes a week after she won a Boston Business Journal CFO of the Year award and months after she helped the company close its $57 million Series C round in February.
Spurling has not updated her LinkedIn profile to reflect her departure, but two sources close to the company confirmed that she left last week, and her name no longer appears on the team page for the company's website. Spurling, who was at the company for a little over a year, declined to comment on this story.
Editor's note (8/7/2016): Spurling has since updated her LinkedIn profile to confirm her departure from Jana.
The two sources said that there have been a number of high-level employees that have left the company in the last three to four months. That includes former Chief Product Officer Yoav Shapira, who already disclosed that he left Jana in April. He recently said he's joining Facebook's Boston office and starting an angel fund with former HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe.
One high-level person who left Jana around the same time Spurling did, according to the two sources, is former director of product Yvan Castilloux. Castilloux did not respond to a request for comment. Three other senior employees had already confirmed on LinkedIn that they left in June, with at least two others, besides Shapira, doing so before then.
Founded in 2009, Jana provides free mobile data to people in emerging markets in exchange for downloading sponsored apps and sending messages on its mCent service. As of February, Jana had more than 30 million users, with roughly two-thirds of them living in India, where mobile data plans can be prohibitively expensive.
Nathan Eagle, Jana's CEO and co-founder, declined to discuss the departures of Spurling and others, saying it's the company's policy not to comment on personnel matters. However, he said, the company's headcount — which was 85 as of July, according to BBJ — has been "steadily increasing since January."
"This shouldn't be surprising given the $57MM Series C we closed in February," Eagle said in an email. "As a high-growth start-up, there will always be new sets of skills and experience necessary to bring us even closer to our mission of making the Internet free for the next billion."
At least three senior departures happened in June: They are former senior data scientist Jameson Toole, former director of engineering Dan Abdinoor and former vice president of operations Sheela Subramanian. Toole and Abdinoor now list themselves on LinkedIn as co-founders of a new startup called Wherehouse. Subramanian, who was part of Jana's founding team, also confirmed her departure with a LinkedIn update.
Other departures this year verified by LinkedIn include former director of sales Brooke Freedman, who left in January, along with former director of product Amartya Sengupta and former lead software engineer Nikka Ghalili, both of whom left in May. Sengupta and Ghalili now list themselves on LinkedIn as co-founders of a new San Francisco startup called Speakeasy.
Many of the departures came after Jana raised its $57 million Series C led by Verizon's venture arm — which Spurling, Jana's now-former CFO, previously told BBJ she helped bring together. She also played a major role in helping move the company to its new Downtown Crossing headquarters and, according to BBJ, helped build out "an effective operations team" and handled "a wide range of duties related to human resources, accounting, finance and office management functions."
