Bhavish Aggarwal & Ankit Bhati on Deep-Tech Bets

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.

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.

Ola Electric has been building a 500-million-dollar Battery Innovation Center in Bengaluru — described as Asia's largest cell R&D facility — and a lithium-ion Gigafactory in Tamil Nadu backed by 240 million dollars of debt and 140 million dollars of equity. The vertical push into cell manufacturing is Bhavish's most ambitious deep-tech bet yet.