Bhavish Aggarwal & Ankit Bhati on Cash-Flow Discipline

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.

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.

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.

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.