When Bhavish Aggarwal said he wanted to set up his own company to organise weekend getaways and short-duration holidays for the residents of Delhi NCR, his father was aghast. “Tu travel agent banna chahta hai! (You want to be a travel agent!)," the father retorted.
Bhavish had graduated from IIT-Bombay and joined Microsoft in 2008. He was in research and liked it. But two years of Microsoft and he could no longer contain his thirst for adventure. He wanted to set up his own company.
His father was fine with the idea but, like most fathers, also apprehensive. Aggarwal managed to convince him that Olatrip.com would be much more than a travel agency and set it up in 2010.
The timing seemed to be perfect. Hordes of people were descending on Delhi-NCR for the Commonwealth Games and, Aggarwal thought, they would naturally want to make a quick trip either to the hills on one side or the desert on the other. So, he would stand outside the Games venues with pamphlets advertising his company’s offerings.
He did not sell a single trip and shut down Olatrip in four months. But not without a life-changing learning. People did indeed want to make those trips Olatrip was offering, but they were keen on someone organising a part of it for them, not necessarily the whole tour. He would get a lot of requests for a vehicle. “Nainital jana hai yaar, gaadi dila de (we are going to Nainital, buddy, can you get us a car?)."
So, Aggarwal set up a website for hiring cars for outstation trips: Olacabs.com. From there, the natural progression was into intra-city cabs. Along with Uber, which came into India in 2013, Ola became synonymous with app-based ride hailing services in the country. And they rose so fast that they became a source of worry for carmakers, who feared a dramatic decline in private ownership of cars.
Elsewhere, Pavan Guntupalli and his mates were building theKarrier, a last-mile intra-city logistics aggregator for trucks. But they realised that it could not create large-scale impact and started Rapido in 2015 to focus on the bike-taxi segment and autorickshaws.
In 2023, Rapido entered the cab aggregation segment and saw a dramatic rise. Since the advent of app-based ride hailing in India, Ola had been number one. It was only in 2023 that Uber overtook it. Now Rapido has dismantled the duopoly. And for that, Guntupalli doffs his hat to Namma Yatri. Launched in 2022, Namma Yatri started a subscription model for drivers, who had been complaining about the commissions of Ola and Uber eating big time into their fare earnings. With Namma Yatri, drivers paid a flat daily fee and kept all of the fares they earned.
The subscription model grew at its own pace, but, as Gladwell would say, the tipping point came when Rapido embraced it and scaled it up across the country.
Through the stories of Ola, Namma Yatri and Rapido, the thing that shines through is someone’s desire to solve a problem. In fact, that is how Uber was born and quickly rose to become the world’s most valued startup. It also became a generic term: Not too long ago, a well-accepted startup business model for venture capitalists was “Uber for X", where a startup would use technology to aggregate services.
What these stories also demonstrate is that every innovation must come with a local flavour. Problems are universal, but also specific: To a geography, to a country, to a town, to a neighbourhood, and to a people.
Their solutions are what transform landscapes.
Suveen Sinha
Editor, Forbes India
Email: suveen.sinha@nw18.com
X ID: @suveensinha
First Published: Jul 15, 2025, 11:43
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