Bhavish Aggarwal & Ankit Bhati on White-Space Creation

Ola Electric was spun out in 2017 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of ANI Technologies, Ola Cabs' parent, with the initial mission of decarbonising Ola's own cab fleet. The Nagpur pilot of May 2017 — charging stations and procured e-cabs, e-buses and e-rickshaws — was the first credible Indian experiment in mass electric mobility by a private platform.

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.