One of world's youngest billionaires to double fortune on Ola IPO

By Satviki Sanjay, Advait Palepu and Pui Gwen Yeung

Just two years ago, Bhavish Aggarwal was facing one of his biggest tests. A video on social media showed an Ola Electric Mobility Ltd. vehicle bursting into flames in the Indian city of Pune, raising doubts about whether his bet on the world’s biggest e-scooter factory would ultimately pay off.
 

The outspoken founder, who’s drawn parallels to Elon Musk, bounced back. Now, the company’s public listing is set to cement his position as one of the world’s youngest billionaires. 

Aggarwal, 38, added $1.4 billion to his wealth after shares of his SoftBank Group Corp.-backed Ola Electric jumped 16 per cent at 10:30 am after its trading debut on Friday in Mumbai, bolstering the entrepreneur’s net worth to $2.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Ola Electric did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Aggarwal’s net worth.

 

The biggest India listing in two years, buoyed by strong investor demand and growing adoption for electric vehicles in the country, is the latest evidence of the country’s red-hot IPO market. 

Despite being yet to turn a profit since it was founded in Bengaluru in 2017, Ola Electric is among the many electric vehicle-linked firms looking at India’s public market to raise money, tapping into the craze for alternative fuels in one of the busiest countries for new share offerings. The firm made a net loss of Rs 1,470 billion in the financial year ended March 2023, its offer document shows. 

“Three years ago when we launched our product, I believe that’s 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 with a $1 billion valuation — thanks to early funding from the likes of SoftBank and Tiger Global Management. At a time when India’s green infrastructure was in its nascency, Aggarwal aimed to build the world’s leading “urban mobility EV company,” he told Bloomberg News in 2021. 

But the company encountered some early stumbles. Shortly after it debuted its electric two-wheelers in 2021, it saw a major setback when Ola scooters were caught up in a spate of high-profile EV battery fires across the country.

The company recalled more than 1,400 scooters in the wake of the incidents. 

Taking on Tesla

A serial entrepreneur, Aggarwal has started companies operating in a range 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 under the age of 40 across the world, excluding Meta Platforms Inc. founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz both of whom turned 40 in May.

Aggarwal in many ways embodies Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s more confident and assertive India. Never one to shy away from offering an opinion, Aggarwal appeared to welcome Tesla Inc.’s decision last month not to invest in India, saying in a post on X, “this is Tesla’s loss, not India’s.”

He seems to relish competing with global giants such as Musk’s EV venture on his home turf. As he put it in an interview with Bloomberg last year: “Tesla is for the West, Ola is for the rest.”

After graduating from one of India’s top technology-focused schools, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Aggarwal started out 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 rival 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 on building large language models, data centers, and ultimately servers and super computers for the AI ecosystem. 

All of his firms are in tech-led sectors, creating data that can be used by his other businesses, said Nitin Pangarkar, associate professor of strategy and policy at the National University of Singapore. “But the attention given to the businesses could be an issue.” 

He owns stake in Ola Cabs and Krutrim, and has also invested undisclosed amounts in tea chain Chaayos and news platform YourStory among others as an angel investor, according to data from Tracxn Technologies Ltd.

He is a vocal supporter of Modi’s aim to boost local manufacturing, and often takes to social media as well as blogs to talk about how his firms can contribute to India’s economic growth. 

In May, he ditched Microsoft Azure’s cloud services for his firm’s and moved to Krutrim cloud after a LinkedIn chatbot used gender neutral pronouns with him. Criticizing Microsoft for “pronoun illness” on his X account, he said Indians need to move away from western concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion and set their own guidelines.

“He’s like India’s Elon Musk,” said Pangarkar. “Brash and abrasive and all that. But that hasn’t stopped Musk from succeeding.”