Bhavish Aggarwal, born on 28 August 1985 in Ludhiana, Punjab, is an Indian entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and chief executive of Ola Consumer, the founder of Ola Electric and the founder of Ola Krutrim, a large language model AI company that became India’s first AI unicorn in 2024, at an estimated valuation of $1 billion. He was included in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2018, and with a net worth reported at $2.3 billion he is among the youngest self-made billionaires in the world.
He was brought up in Ludhiana and completed a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2008. He started his career at Microsoft Research India as a research intern and was later taken on as an assistant researcher. In his two years at Microsoft he filed two patents and published three papers in international journals.
In January 2011 he co-founded Ola Cabs in Bengaluru with Ankit Bhati. Other accounts date the idea to 2010: the idea for a cab company struck Aggarwal after a bad experience with a taxi, which led him and Bhati to start the business. Ola grew into one of India’s largest ride-hailing platforms.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a severe test. In May 2020 Ola Cabs announced the layoff of around 5,000 employees to survive the economic effects of the pandemic, after revenue fell by about 95 percent. In a webinar for students of Bennett University, Aggarwal said the pandemic would accelerate technological innovation and that markets might move towards more car rentals and subscription-based car ownership.
In April 2022 an internal email announced that Aggarwal would step back from the day-to-day running of Ola to concentrate on the group’s ventures in electric vehicles and quick commerce. In August 2024 Ola Cabs was rebranded as Ola Consumer to offer a broader range of consumer services. He founded Ola Electric to make electric scooters and later launched Krutrim, whose 2024 valuation made it India’s first AI unicorn.
His management style has drawn comment. In 2022 he was criticised over the work culture at Ola, with reports of a series of senior exits, and he defended his approach as his personal style, saying that “passions and emotions run high and we are not on an easy journey”. He has also backed the idea of long working hours put forward by Infosys co-founder N. R. Narayana Murthy and has said he does not believe in the concept of a five-day week. In May 2024 he described the use of preferred gender pronouns as a “western illness”, which drew criticism online. Those episodes are part of the public record, and Wikipedia also reports a complaint filed in Bengaluru in October 2025 in connection with an Ola Electric employee’s death, which the company has challenged in the Karnataka High Court.
He received the ET Awards’ Richest of the Year title in 2017. Aggarwal’s career shows both the speed with which Indian consumer-technology businesses can scale and the scrutiny that comes with it, and his latest ventures, electric vehicles and artificial intelligence, will determine whether his reputation as one of India’s defining start-up founders lasts.
Featured image: An Ola S1 Pro electric scooter (file photo, 2022; not a photo of Bhavish Aggarwal). Photo by SnapMeUp, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
