Bhavish Aggarwal & Ankit Bhati on Brand Building

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.

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.