Aditya Mehendale joins as Executive Creative Director, alongside key leadership elevations across innovation, strategy and finance, as Kulfi scales its culture-first creative model
Kulfi Collective, the creative studio that helps brands build in culture, is growing its leadership team as it enters its next phase of growth. At a time when marketing is shifting from reach to resonance, campaigns to communities, and mono-culture to nuanced micro-cultures, Kulfi is evolving its model around a simple belief: brands need to participate in culture, not just advertise around it.
The company is currently building what it calls an operating system for brands in culture — a connected creative ecosystem designed to move seamlessly from cultural signals and insights to ideas, production, distribution and analysis. The goal is to create a tighter loop between creativity, technology, intelligence and community.
As part of this next chapter, Kulfi has appointed Aditya Mehendale as Executive Creative Director. He joins alongside three key leadership elevations: Jayson D’Mello as Chief Innovation Officer, Abhimanyu Singh as Chief Strategy Officer, and Abhinandan Jain as Chief Financial Officer. Together, the expanded leadership team will help Kulfi scale what it calls “cultural objects”, campaigns, content, experiences, communities, tools and IP designed to live beyond media plans and become part of how people discover, discuss, participate in and remember brands.
Jayson D’Mello will lead Kulfi’s investments into AI and agentic workflows, building systems across the company’s intelligence, strategy and production offerings. Abhimanyu Singh will focus on building client-facing products across cultural intelligence, creative systems, analytics and distribution. Abhinandan Jain will lead the company’s financial strategy as Kulfi expands its creative capabilities, platform infrastructure and global ambitions.
Mehendale will lead Kulfi’s creative direction as the company enters this new phase. With over a decade of experience across independent and network agencies, he brings a combination of creative ambition, organisational leadership and digital-native storytelling. He joins Kulfi after eight years at Schbang, where he eventually became National Creative Head and helped scale the company through a period of rapid growth. Most recently, he served as Executive Creative Director at Leo Burnett. Over the years, he has creatively helmed an array of award-winning work, including launching the brand identity for Raw Pressery, and marquee campaigns for Fevicol, Fevikwik, Jeep, Mattel (HotWheels & Barbie), H&M, and Amazon Prime Video.
On the company’s transformation plan, Advait Gupt, Co-founder & CEO of Kulfi Collective, said: “We’ve spent the last few years asking ourselves what a modern creative company should actually look like. For us, the answer was clear: it has to be faster, more intelligent, more collaborative, and much closer to culture itself. These leadership changes are about building the team that can help us do that at scale.”
Speaking about Aditya’s appointment, Akshat Gupt, Chief Creative Officer and Co-founder at Kulfi Collective, added: “Aditya joins us at a deeply important moment in Kulfi’s journey. As we rethink how creativity is built, scaled and experienced in an AI-native world, we needed a leader who understands both creative ambition and organisational transformation. He has built and led large creative teams, driven exceptional work across categories, and understands how to put systems in place without losing the soul of the craft. That balance is incredibly important to us as we build the future of Kulfi.”
Commenting on his move, Aditya Mehendale said: “What really stood out to me about Kulfi was that it doesn’t define itself by the medium. In 2026, the lines between mainline, digital, entertainment and tech are all blurring anyway. Kulfi’s focus is simply on creating work that genuinely leaves a mark on culture. That changes the way you think creatively; you stop thinking in deliverables and start thinking about impact and influence. To me, what makes Kulfi exciting is its ambition to create work that isn’t just served to people, but that they actually want to seek out, participate in, and remember.”
From campaigns and experiences for Spotify, Netflix, Red Bull, Meta, LEGO and Nothing to immersive storytelling, original content and AI-led creative systems, Kulfi has consistently operated at the intersection of culture, community and technology.
With this expanded leadership structure, the company enters its next chapter focused on scaling creativity without sanding down originality, and building systems that help brands become part of culture.
