Bhavish Aggarwal & Ankit Bhati on Scale Economics

Ola started with bookings via phone call and only introduced a mobile app in June 2012. By early 2015 it claimed the largest market share in Indian ride-hailing, ahead of TaxiForSure, Meru Cabs and the newly-arrived Uber. The 2015 acquisition of TaxiForSure for about 1,237 crore rupees consolidated that lead — a textbook case of buying the closest domestic competitor.

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 December 2020 Ola committed about 2,400 crore rupees (around 324 million dollars) to build what it called the world's largest two-wheeler factory on a 500-acre site in Krishnagiri, Tamil Nadu. The Future Factory deployed automated robots in welding, painting and battery lines, and made headlines by staffing its manufacturing floor entirely with women — an unusual gendered labour choice in Indian auto manufacturing.

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.

Customer bookings hit 500,000 in the first month of Ola S1 scooter availability, and the company began deliveries in December 2021 with the first hundred units in Bengaluru and Chennai. Several promised features were not enabled at launch — a software-readiness lag that drew early criticism and prompted iterative over-the-air updates through 2022.