Bhavish Aggarwal & Ankit Bhati on Governance

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 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.

After a March 2022 scooter fire in Pune, Ola recalled 1,441 units as a 'pre-emptive measure,' and later in 2023 offered free front-fork arm replacements on the S1 and S1 Pro after safety-defect criticism. The recall-and-fix cycle illustrated the reputational cost of moving from crowdfunding-stage prototype to mass production at scale.

In October 2024 the Central Consumer Protection Authority issued a show-cause notice to Ola Electric covering more than 10,000 unaddressed customer complaints in a year — a regulatory moment that punctured the post-IPO goodwill and forced the company to publicly commit to service-network investments.