Bhavish Aggarwal & Ankit Bhati on Founder Culture

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.