Bhavish Aggarwal & Ankit Bhati on Technology Pivot

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.

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 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.