Ola (ANI Technologies)

Ola Electric was spun out in 2017 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of ANI Technologies, Ola Cabs' parent, with the initial mission of decarbonising Ola's own cab fleet. The Nagpur pilot of May 2017 — charging stations and procured e-cabs, e-buses and e-rickshaws — was the first credible Indian experiment in mass electric mobility by a private platform.

Bhavish Aggarwal was born in 1985 in Ludhiana, Punjab, and graduated in computer engineering from IIT Bombay in 2008. He spent two years at Microsoft Research India, filing two patents and publishing three international papers — an unusual research-first training for an Indian consumer-internet founder, and one that later surfaced in his insistence on building core IP rather than licensing it.

The original venture was Olatrip.com, a Delhi-region trip-planning company Bhavish Aggarwal set up in 2010. In January 2011, joined by Ankit Bhati, he pivoted to Ola Cabs as a taxi-aggregation firm — an early instance of a smart Indian founder identifying that the cab supply was fragmented enough to be aggregated by software.

Aggarwal co-founded Ola Cabs in January 2011 with Ankit Bhati in Bengaluru after a bad personal taxi experience crystallised the mobility opportunity. The partnership paired Bhavish's product-and-strategy bent with Ankit's engineering lead, an operating division of labour that survived until Ankit's later exit from day-to-day operations.

Ola started with bookings via phone call and only introduced a mobile app in June 2012. By early 2015 it claimed the largest market share in Indian ride-hailing, ahead of TaxiForSure, Meru Cabs and the newly-arrived Uber. The 2015 acquisition of TaxiForSure for about 1,237 crore rupees consolidated that lead — a textbook case of buying the closest domestic competitor.

In a striking cap-table move, Aggarwal bought a 92.5 percent stake in Ola Electric from ANI Technologies in late 2018 / early 2019 at a valuation of roughly one lakh rupees (about 1,400 dollars then). ANI retained the remaining 7.5 percent in exchange for licensing the 'Ola' brand, in effect letting the founder house the new venture outside the existing cap table.

Bhavish has since stacked three roles on his own plate: co-founder and CEO of Ola Consumer (the ride-hailing arm), founder of Ola Electric, and founder of Ola Krutrim — the LLM venture that became India's first public AI unicorn at a roughly one-billion-dollar valuation in 2024. The triple-stack approach has drawn both admiration for founder ambition and questions about governance bandwidth.

By August 2015 Ola was operating in over 100 cities and converted to an app-only service — a bold bet on the smartphone at a moment when India's mobile data revolution was still nascent. The app-only decision was reversed later as voice-channel demand persisted, an early lesson that hard channel pivots in India rarely survive consumer behaviour.

Ola expanded internationally in 2018 — Australia in January, New Zealand in September, the UK in March 2019, and London in February 2020 with over 25,000 drivers registered. In April 2024 the company abruptly exited all international markets with only a few days' notice, refocusing capital on India — a tacit admission that the globalisation phase had not delivered attractive unit economics.

In April 2022 Bhavish announced he was stepping away from day-to-day operations of Ola Consumer to focus on Ola Electric and quick-commerce bets. The shift effectively partitioned his time toward the EV and AI thesis, leaving the cab business to a leaner operating leadership and signalling where he saw the next decade of value creation.

Ola posted its first operating profit of roughly 90 crore rupees in FY2020–21, a moment of operational break-even after a decade of cash burn. The result was overshadowed by the COVID disruption that had cut ride-hailing revenue by about 95 percent at the trough, forcing a roughly 1,400-person layoff in May 2020.

Aggarwal was named to Time's 100 Most Influential People list in 2018, recognising his role in building the country's dominant ride-hailing franchise. Forbes estimated his net worth at around 2.3 billion dollars, placing him among the world's youngest self-made billionaires — a position materially reinforced by the Ola Electric IPO pop in 2024.

The Ola Foods history shows the founder's restlessness beyond the core: a March 2015 Ola Cafe attempt that closed within a year, a December 2017 acquisition of Foodpanda India with a planned 200-million-dollar infusion, the discontinuation of food delivery in June 2019, and a continued cloud-kitchen business that ran more than 50 outlets by 2021. The repeated attempts yielded limited strategic value relative to capital spent.

Bhavish has openly backed Narayana Murthy's 70-hour work-week stance and publicly rejected the concept of work-life balance, calling the five-day week and weekends 'a western concept.' The stance positioned him as the Indian founder most willing to argue against the work-life balance consensus, with doctors publicly warning of the health risks of sustained overwork.

A series of vertical bets — Ola Dash (quick commerce), Ola Cars (new and pre-owned car marketplace), Ola Pedal (bike sharing) — were launched, scaled down and finally shut between 2021 and 2022. The serial closure pattern reinforced the impression of an experimentation engine inside Ola, with capital spent on category exploration rather than on a focused core.

Reports have portrayed Aggarwal as an aggressive operator: tearing up presentations over missing page numbers, making an employee run laps for a minor mistake, and a string of senior exits from Ola Cars, Ola CFO and Ola Electric's CMO roles. Bhavish defended the style as the price of building something that is not a 'me-too' company.

In 2024 Ola migrated from Microsoft Azure to its own Krutrim cloud, and from Google Maps to an in-house Ola Maps built on the 2021 GeoSpoc acquisition. The vendor-replacement programme was positioned by Bhavish as India-first infrastructure independence — a strategic and reputational signal as much as a cost play.

In May 2024 Aggarwal posted on X that preferred gender pronouns were a 'western illness,' triggering an online backlash and accusations of homophobia and transphobia. LinkedIn removed the post for violating community guidelines, after which Bhavish publicly moved Ola Consumer off Microsoft Azure onto his own Krutrim Cloud — an unusually public coupling of culture-war positioning with vendor strategy.

On 18 August 2024 Ola Cabs was rebranded as Ola Consumer, signalling a broader pivot from a pure ride-hailing brand to a multi-vertical consumer platform. The rename followed the Ola Electric IPO by days and aligned Ola's three faces — Consumer, Electric and Krutrim — under a unified house of brands strategy.

Ankit Bhati, the other half of the founding duo, anchored the engineering function at Ola in its early years and contributed materially to the platform's scaling infrastructure. While Bhavish became the public face of the group, Ankit's operating role wound down before the EV pivot — a quieter founder-exit arc that contrasted with Bhavish's increasingly public persona.