Sunny Gutta is Reddit’s Director of Treasury, where she leads the company’s treasury function, overseeing capital markets, enterprise risk management, cash operations and treasury technology. With more than 15 years of experience spanning treasury, corporate finance, capital markets and investment management, she is an accomplished finance leader with a track record of driving strategic and operational excellence across industries.

Before joining Reddit, Gutta held treasury leadership roles at General Motors, where she managed multi-billion-dollar credit facilities and led strategic initiatives to strengthen liquidity, optimise capital structure and improve operational efficiency. Earlier in her career, she built a strong foundation in investment advisory and venture capital in India, contributing to successful investments and value creation initiatives.

Gutta earned her MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and is a CFA charter holder. She also serves on the board of directors of the CFA Society Detroit.

From the earliest days of her professional life, Sunny Gutta knew finance was both a core strength and a field she wanted to explore broadly. She began as an investment banking analyst, where she developed analytical rigour, learned how to work through complex problems and gained exposure to multiple industries – skills that continue to shape how she leads treasury today.

“I then created what was effectively my own rotational programme within finance,” she recalls. “At a mid-sized wealth management firm, I provided economic insights and investment ideas to portfolio managers. That experience taught me to connect macroeconomic developments with investment decisions and risk.”

Gutta subsequently worked in venture capital, sourcing and evaluating investment opportunities that helped to build her understanding of how ideas make or break and how finance can support business objectives.

She believes these experiences have given her different perspectives on capital, risk and decision-making and continues to draw on all of them in treasury, whether evaluating an investment, considering a capital markets decision or advising the business.

Gutta completed her MBA programme from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in 2016 and says it was a formative experience, particularly at that stage of her career. “The academic programme broadened my understanding of business beyond my finance foundation but the greatest benefit came from studying and working with people from different cultures, industries and backgrounds,” she says. “Those interactions challenged my assumptions and gave me a broader perspective on how businesses and teams operate.”

Unsurprisingly, she would recommend an MBA to any finance professional – and more broadly to early- or mid-career professionals – who want to expand their perspective, explore new paths or deepen their understanding of business. While acknowledging that it represents a significant investment, she suggests it is most valuable when it is connected to a clear personal objective rather than viewed as an automatic next step.

In 2017, Gutta joined General Motors as a treasury analyst – her first corporate treasury role. “My move into treasury was very deliberate,” she explains. “While I enjoyed financial strategy and planning, I wanted greater exposure to execution. Corporate treasury offered the right combination of strategy, planning and implementation, allowing me to see decisions through from initial analysis to real-world outcomes.”

“Treasury is also an unusually broad function. It encompasses capital markets, liquidity, cash and investment management, financial risk management and capital planning among many other areas. The move gave me an end-to-end perspective on how companies manage capital while allowing me to build on my earlier experience in banking, investments and corporate finance.”

Looking back, she believes this was an important inflection point in her career and confirmed that treasury was where she wanted to build her core, long-term expertise.

In 2021, a former colleague reached out about an opportunity on Reddit’s treasury team. Reddit had just brought on its first chief financial officer and was building out its finance organisation in preparation for a potential initial public offering.

“I knew treasury would play an important role in that journey and I was excited to join during those formative years,” recalls Gutta. “The opportunity to help build the function while contributing to such a pivotal stage in the company’s growth was extremely compelling.”

Appropriately given the nature of business, this move reinforced the value of maintaining a strong professional network. Gutta notes that throughout her career, relationships have opened doors to new opportunities, provided different perspectives and created opportunities for collaboration and problem solving and refers to this experience as a great reminder that a professional network is an investment that continues to pay dividends over time.

Reddit’s treasury team has a broad mandate. It oversees capital planning, including subsidiary and intercompany funding; capital markets activities across debt and equity; cash and investment management; liquidity planning and forecasting; and financial risk management, including foreign currency exposure.

Since becoming director, Gutta’s focus has been on building a treasury function that can scale alongside the business. That has included strengthening the company’s forecasting and investment-management capabilities, implementing a treasury management system, enhancing reporting and identifying opportunities to automate operational processes.

“We have also expanded treasury’s role as a strategic partner across the company,” she adds. “For example, we work closely with teams across finance, sales, sourcing and operations to assess the cash flow, liquidity and counterparty implications of commercial decisions, strengthen deal guardrails and identify working capital opportunities.”

At the same time, the treasury team has been building capabilities such as foreign exchange risk management and intercompany netting to support Reddit’s continued international growth.

Ultimately, the goal has been to move beyond executing individual transactions and build a durable treasury platform with the right people, processes, technology and partnerships to support the company’s long-term growth.

Gutta explains that technology has been central to making Reddit’s treasury function more scalable. The company has implemented a number of solutions including a treasury management system and an investment reporting platform, improving visibility, controls and efficiency across cash management, payments, forecasting and investments. “We are also exploring how AI can support parts of the treasury workflow,” she says. “Potential use cases include systems administration, forecasting and variance analysis, anomaly detection and developing initial ideas for presentations and other materials.”

Gutta views AI as a tool that augments professional judgement rather than replaces it and stresses that for treasury, it is especially important that AI adoption is paired with strong controls, appropriate safeguards of company data and meaningful human review.

More broadly, her objective is not simply to automate existing processes. It is to use technology to eliminate repetitive work so that the team can spend more time on higher value activities and tasks, including analysis, risk management and serving as a strategic partner to the business.

As with many businesses, treasury will play an increasingly important role as Reddit continues to grow and its financial needs become more complex. Gutta sees the treasury team’s responsibility as ensuring the company has the liquidity, capital structure, risk management framework and financial infrastructure needed to pursue its objectives confidently.

“Looking ahead, we will remain focused on our core mandate of ensuring that cash, liquidity and financial risk are managed in line with the company’s needs,” she says. “At the same time, I see treasury becoming an even stronger strategic partner to the business – engaging with stakeholders earlier, helping evaluate opportunities and trade-offs and turning strategic priorities into practical financial solutions.”

The team will also continue using technology to make the function more efficient, scalable and insight-driven and is confident that by automating routine work and improving access to financial information, it can create more capacity for analysis, strategic partnership and execution.

“Just as important is investing in our people,” adds Gutta. “Building a high performing treasury team means developing and combining technical expertise with curiosity, sound judgement and strong cross-functional collaboration. Those capabilities will be essential as we continue to scale the function and support Reddit’s next stage of growth.”

Gutta has taken a rather unconventional path into corporate treasury. When asked to outline the most important lessons she has learned through her career, she refers to the importance of realising that transformation is as much about people and change management as it is about technology – something that has become even more relevant as AI reshapes the way we work.

“Technology can enable improvement but sustainable change depends on shared accountability, disciplined execution and a team that understands the purpose behind the work,” she says. “Too often, change falls short when leaders do not adequately prepare their teams or take a broader view of how it will affect stakeholders across the organisation.”

The process of implementing a treasury management system reinforced that lesson as it was a reminder that a TMS can easily be viewed solely as treasury software, leading treasury leaders to select and implement it independently.

In practice, the system delivers far greater value when leaders consider how accounting, accounts payable and other functions can also benefit from it. Involving those stakeholders early leads to better decisions, stronger adoption and ultimately a better outcome for the business.

“That experience has shaped how I think about leadership,” explains Gutta. “Successful transformation isn’t just about selecting the right technology; it’s about bringing people along, communicating the ‘why’, building shared ownership and designing solutions that create value across the organisation.”

So what would she say has been her biggest achievement in corporate treasury? “One of the achievements I am particularly proud of is helping build a treasury function that could support Reddit through its transition into a public company and beyond,” says Gutta. “That involved developing core capabilities such as cash forecasting, investment governance and liquidity planning, while also leading or supporting important IPO workstreams – including bank selection, deal term negotiations, transaction structuring and the management of proceeds.”

What makes this especially meaningful is that it was not a single transaction. “We were building the underlying processes, relationships and team capabilities that the company would continue to rely on after the IPO. Helping Reddit reach an important milestone while creating a stronger long-term treasury platform has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.”

As she previously told Treasury Today Group, the decision to delay that entity’s IPO from 2022 created a two-year quiet period that allowed it to build real operating discipline and become a better public company.

“Our experience underscored that optimal timing requires a balance between favourable market conditions and internal organisational preparedness and the CFO is best positioned to assess that intersection, which is why their input should be central.”

Gutta describes her leadership style as supportive and adaptive. She believes it is important to set clear objectives, establish expectations and provide direction, while recognising that every team member brings a different level of experience, set of strengths and career aspirations.

“I tailor my approach to provide each person with the support they need to succeed and develop,” she says. “Ultimately, my goal is to build a team where people feel trusted, supported and empowered to take ownership. I want team members to develop the confidence to make decisions, learn from experience and continue growing throughout their careers.”

One of the key questions for any treasurer is how to position themselves as strategic partners for business growth and identify the skills required to move up the value chain. Gutta reckons curiosity is one of the most important qualities for a strategic treasurer, noting that the best treasury professionals continuously seek to understand how the business creates value, where it is investing and what could enable – or constrain – its growth.

“They can translate a business proposal into its implications for cash flow, liquidity, capital, risk and operational complexity,” she says. “Just as importantly, they can explain those implications in clear, practical terms that colleagues across the business make better decisions. Technical treasury expertise remains essential but moving up the value chain also requires commercial understanding, analytical ability, strong communication, technological fluency and cross-functional influence.”

Reddit was the winner of the Judges’ Choice award at the 2025 Adam Smith Awards, an accolade Gutta describes as both an honour and a meaningful milestone for the team.

“The judges’ choice recognition highlighted the distinct creative features of Reddit’s IPO and its significance within the broader IPO market,” she says. “We knew we were pursuing an innovative approach but receiving independent recognition from industry experts was strong validation of the team’s exceptional work and the collaboration between Reddit and our external partners.”

According to Gutta, treasury successes are often the result of extensive work performed behind the scenes. “Recognition such as this gives teams an opportunity to pause and appreciate what they have accomplished and also allows them to share their experiences with the wider treasury community, contributing to the exchange of ideas, innovation and leading practices.”