Bhavish Aggarwal

Some Lesser Known Facts About Bhavish Aggarwal

• Bhavish spent his childhood in United Kingdoms. His parents moved to Ludhiana, India when he was ten years old.

• Bhavish went to Kota, Rajasthan to for the IIT entrance exam, although he could not pass the exam in his first attempt and later went back to Ludhiana, prepared for the exam at home and cleared the IIT entrance exam.

• In 2004, he secured rant of 23rd rank in the IIT entrance exam.

• He started his career with Microsoft Research India as a research intern and later got reinstated as an assistant researcher.

•  in July 2010, Bhavish Aggarwal filed two patents and published three papers in international journals at Microsoft, however, he later left Microsoft.

• Bhavish shared the story behind the idea of OLA cabs. He shared that while he was traveling from Bangalore to Bandipur in a car, the driver stopped and started negotiating the previously fixed deal and travel fare, when Bhavish denied giving the extra fare that the driver demanded, he left him in the middle of the road, which left Bhavish very annoyed, and that is how he got the inspiration to start an online cab service.

• In January 2011 he co-founded Ola Cabs with Ankit Bhati in Bengaluru.

• Bhavish first invested 5 Lakhs, which he saved from his previous job and duringg the first round of funding Ola secured 34 Lakhs from Kunal Bahl, Rehan Yar Khan, and Anupam Mittal.

• He established Ola’s first office in a 1BHK space in a mall in Powai. They started operating through their website Olatrips.com and later switched to their application for booking rides.

• In 2016, he was one the youngest person to be listed in the under 30 list of Forbes India.

• On 26 May 2017, Bhavish launched Ola Electrics under ANI Technologies and launched a pilot project in May 2017, Nagpur, Maharashtra by setting up charging stations across the city.

• In 2018 Bhavish Aggarwal was included in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People.

• In 2020, he set up a driver’s fund during the Covid-19 lockdown, where he contributed his one year’s salary to the fund.

• In September 2021, Bhavish announced that Ola Electric’s future factory will employee only women as its employees and will give employment to more than 10,000 women.

• In April 2022, an internal email to Ola employees was sent out which announced 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.

• In April 2023, Krutrim Si Designs was set up by Bhavish Aggarwal along with Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tenneti, a board member at ANI Technologies Limited, the parent company of Ola Cabs and Ola Electric.

• In August 2024, Ola Cabs was rebranded to Ola Consumer to offer a broader range of consumer services.

• Bhavish Aggarwal is one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the world.

• Bhavish aims to provide Electric cars to the public between $1000 to $50,000

• He is a pet lover. He has three office dogs in OLA Electric’s headquarter in Bengaluru. They are named Husky, Fatty and Happy.

• He like to do photography and owns a photography blog.

• He drove a taxi occasionally when he started Ola cabs and addressed customer calls.

• It took him three years to convince his wife to ride in an ola taxi.

• His favorite book is the biography of Apple’s founder Steve Jobs.

• He likes to play squash and do cycling.