| Bhavish Aggarwal | |
| Birth Date: | 1985 8, df=yes |
| Birth Place: | Ludhiana, Punjab, India |
| Alma Mater: | IIT Bombay (B.Tech) |
| Occupation: | Entrepreneur |
| Co-founder and CEO of Ola Cabs Founder of Ola Electric Founder of Krutrim | |
| Spouse: | Rajalakshmi Aggarwal |
Bhavish Aggarwal (born 28 August 1985) is an Indian entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Ola Cabs, founder of Ola Electric[1] and founder of OlaKrutrim, a large language model artificial intelligence (AI) company which became India’s first AI unicorn in 2024 an estimated valuation of $1 billion.[2] [3]
Aggarwal was included in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2018. [4] With a net worth of $2.3 billion, Aggarwal is one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the world.[5]
Aggarwal was born and brought up in Ludhiana, Punjab.[6] [7] He completed a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2008.[8] He started his career with Microsoft Research India as a research intern and later got reinstated as an assistant researcher.[9]
He began his career with Microsoft, where he worked for two years, filed two patents and published three papers in international journals.[8] In January 2011 he co-founded Ola Cabs with Ankit Bhati in Bengaluru.[10]
The idea for a cab company struck Aggarwal when he had a bad experience with a taxi, which led him and Ankit Bhati to co-found Ola Cabs in 2010.
In May 2020, Ola Cabs announced a huge layoff of around 5000 employees in a move to survive the economic repercussions of COVID-19. It had suffered an overwhelming loss of revenue by about 95%.[11] In a webinar addressed to the students of Bennet University, Bhavish said that the COVID-19 pandemic was about to accelerate the innovations in technologies. He claimed that the markets might move towards more car rentals and subscription-based ownerships of cars.[12]
In April 2022, An internal email to Ola employees was sent out, announcing that Bhavish Aggarwal would be stepping down from day-to-day operations of the company to focus on the future of Ola’s venture into electric vehicles and quick-commerce.[13]
In May 2024, Bhavish made remarks via his Twitter/X account.[14] [15]
He termed the use of preferred gender pronouns as a "western illness", which caused an online backlash from some on X with some users labelling him as homophobic, transphobic and conservative.[16] [17] LinkedIn removed his posts on "gender illness" citing community guidelines,[18] following which Ola Cabs switched cloud services from Microsoft Azure.[19]