Just two years ago, Bhavish Aggarwal He was facing his biggest test. A video on social media showed that Ola Electric Mobility LimitedA vehicle fire in the Indian city of Pune has raised doubts about whether his bet on the world’s largest e-scooter factory will ultimately succeed.
The outspoken founder, who has drawn parallels Elon MuskNow, the company’s public listing has cemented his status as one of the world’s youngest billionaires.
Aggarwal, 38, will add $1.2 billion to his wealth if his company Ola Electric, backed by SoftBank Group Corp, lists at the lowest price band of Rs 72 per share in Mumbai on Friday, taking the entrepreneur’s net worth to $2.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Ola Electric did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Aggarwal’s net worth.
Despite failing to turn a profit yet since being founded in Bengaluru in 2017, Ola Electric is one of several electric vehicle-related firms looking to raise funds in India’s public market, capitalising on a craze for alternative fuels in one of the busiest countries for new share offerings. The firm posted a net loss of Rs 14.7 billion in the financial year ended March 2023, its offering document shows.
“Three years ago when we launched our product, I believe that was when the EV story began,” Aggarwal said at a press conference in Mumbai in late July.
Just two years after its founding and without having shipped a single scooter, Ola Electric had become a unicorn — a startup valued at $1 billion — thanks to early funding from the likes of SoftBank and Tiger Global Management. At a time when India’s green infrastructure was in its infancy, Aggarwal told Bloomberg News in 2021 that his goal was to build the world’s leading “urban mobility EV company.”
But the company faced some initial difficulties. Shortly after launching its electric two-wheelers in 2021, the company suffered a major setback when Ola scooters were caught in high-profile EV battery fire incidents across the country.
The company recalled more than 1,400 scooters in the wake of these incidents.
Competition with Tesla
As a serial entrepreneur, Aggarwal has started companies operating in a variety of industries, from online payments to artificial intelligence.
Even before the listing of his electric-vehicle company, Aggarwal had joined an exclusive club. Bloomberg’s wealth index of the world’s top 500 billionaires lists only seven people under the age of 40 worldwide, not including Meta Platforms Inc. founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, who turn 40 in May.
In many ways, Agrawal is a symbol of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s more confident and assertive India. Never one to shy away from voicing his opinion, Agrawal last month welcomed Tesla Inc’s decision not to invest in India, saying in a post on X, “This is Tesla’s loss, not India’s.”
He seems to enjoy competing with global giants like Musk’s EV venture on his home turf. As he said in an interview with Bloomberg last year: “Tesla is for the West, Ola is for the rest.”
After graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, one of India’s top technology-focused schools, Aggarwal began working at Microsoft Research India before founding his first company in 2010. Ola Cabs, or ANI Technologies Pvt., was launched as a ride-hailing app to take on Uber Technologies Inc. and soon expanded beyond cab services into online payments and food-delivery.
He founded his latest venture, Krutrim, in 2023, which became India’s first $1 billion AI startup in January this year. Through Krutrim, he plans to build large language models, data centres, and eventually servers and supercomputers for the AI ecosystem.
Nitin Pangarkar, associate professor of strategy and policy at the National University of Singapore, said all his firms are in technology-based sectors, generating data that can be used by his other businesses. “But the focus on businesses can be an issue.”
He holds stakes in Ola Cabs and Crewtrim, and has also invested an undisclosed amount in tea chain Chaayos and news platform YourStory as an angel investor, according to data from Tracxn Technologies Ltd.
He is a vocal supporter of Modi’s aim to promote local manufacturing, and frequently discusses on social media as well as blogs about how his companies can contribute to India’s economic growth.
In May, he abandoned Microsoft Azure’s cloud services for his firm and moved to CrewTrib cloud, because a LinkedIn chatbot used gender neutral pronouns with him. Criticising Microsoft for “pronoun sickness” on his X account, he said Indians need to move away from Western concepts of diversity, equality and inclusion and set their own guidelines.
“He is like the Elon Musk of India. He is very brash and aggressive. But that did not stop Musk from being successful,” Pangarkar said.
The outspoken founder, who has drawn parallels Elon MuskNow, the company’s public listing has cemented his status as one of the world’s youngest billionaires.
Aggarwal, 38, will add $1.2 billion to his wealth if his company Ola Electric, backed by SoftBank Group Corp, lists at the lowest price band of Rs 72 per share in Mumbai on Friday, taking the entrepreneur’s net worth to $2.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Ola Electric did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Aggarwal’s net worth.
Despite failing to turn a profit yet since being founded in Bengaluru in 2017, Ola Electric is one of several electric vehicle-related firms looking to raise funds in India’s public market, capitalising on a craze for alternative fuels in one of the busiest countries for new share offerings. The firm posted a net loss of Rs 14.7 billion in the financial year ended March 2023, its offering document shows.
“Three years ago when we launched our product, I believe that was when the EV story began,” Aggarwal said at a press conference in Mumbai in late July.
Just two years after its founding and without having shipped a single scooter, Ola Electric had become a unicorn — a startup valued at $1 billion — thanks to early funding from the likes of SoftBank and Tiger Global Management. At a time when India’s green infrastructure was in its infancy, Aggarwal told Bloomberg News in 2021 that his goal was to build the world’s leading “urban mobility EV company.”
But the company faced some initial difficulties. Shortly after launching its electric two-wheelers in 2021, the company suffered a major setback when Ola scooters were caught in high-profile EV battery fire incidents across the country.
The company recalled more than 1,400 scooters in the wake of these incidents.
Competition with Tesla
As a serial entrepreneur, Aggarwal has started companies operating in a variety of industries, from online payments to artificial intelligence.
Even before the listing of his electric-vehicle company, Aggarwal had joined an exclusive club. Bloomberg’s wealth index of the world’s top 500 billionaires lists only seven people under the age of 40 worldwide, not including Meta Platforms Inc. founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, who turn 40 in May.
In many ways, Agrawal is a symbol of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s more confident and assertive India. Never one to shy away from voicing his opinion, Agrawal last month welcomed Tesla Inc’s decision not to invest in India, saying in a post on X, “This is Tesla’s loss, not India’s.”
He seems to enjoy competing with global giants like Musk’s EV venture on his home turf. As he said in an interview with Bloomberg last year: “Tesla is for the West, Ola is for the rest.”
After graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, one of India’s top technology-focused schools, Aggarwal began working at Microsoft Research India before founding his first company in 2010. Ola Cabs, or ANI Technologies Pvt., was launched as a ride-hailing app to take on Uber Technologies Inc. and soon expanded beyond cab services into online payments and food-delivery.
He founded his latest venture, Krutrim, in 2023, which became India’s first $1 billion AI startup in January this year. Through Krutrim, he plans to build large language models, data centres, and eventually servers and supercomputers for the AI ecosystem.
Nitin Pangarkar, associate professor of strategy and policy at the National University of Singapore, said all his firms are in technology-based sectors, generating data that can be used by his other businesses. “But the focus on businesses can be an issue.”
He holds stakes in Ola Cabs and Crewtrim, and has also invested an undisclosed amount in tea chain Chaayos and news platform YourStory as an angel investor, according to data from Tracxn Technologies Ltd.
He is a vocal supporter of Modi’s aim to promote local manufacturing, and frequently discusses on social media as well as blogs about how his companies can contribute to India’s economic growth.
In May, he abandoned Microsoft Azure’s cloud services for his firm and moved to CrewTrib cloud, because a LinkedIn chatbot used gender neutral pronouns with him. Criticising Microsoft for “pronoun sickness” on his X account, he said Indians need to move away from Western concepts of diversity, equality and inclusion and set their own guidelines.
“He is like the Elon Musk of India. He is very brash and aggressive. But that did not stop Musk from being successful,” Pangarkar said.
