15 years and 3 unicorns: Will Bhavish Aggarwal's disruption run continue?

“In the EV space, the only way we can create impact is to play the scale game,” Aggarwal had told Forbes India in an interview in March 2021. “Because, unless you build at scale, you cannot bring the cost down enough, and you cannot get consumers excited.”

Soon enough, Ola Electric Mobility attracted the attention of global private equity heavyweights, raising funding from the likes of SoftBank and Tiger Global before deciding to go public last year. The IPO was a success, and within months, the company’s market cap even zoomed to ₹64,400 crore. Sales of Ola’s EVs had been on an upswing.

Also read: Inside Ola's not-so-electric ride with Krutrim AI

The dream run though has hit some headwinds in 2025. After being the largest electric two-wheeler maker selling more than 35 percent of the nearly 1.1 million electric two-wheelers in the country last year, this year has seen Ola Mobility struggle to remain on the top as incumbents have upped their game backed by their strong dealer networks, better supply network and brand loyalty.

The two-wheeler maker has also been hit by a series of concerns regarding the quality of its offerings and discrepancies in sales numbers, with even the Indian government looking to investigate into them. In February, the company claimed to have sold 25,000 scooters, but actual registrations were only 8,652 due to a dispute with its vehicle registration vendors forcing the government to seek responses from the automaker.

“To regain its market position, Ola needs to focus on enhancing service infrastructure, maintaining competitive pricing without eroding margins, and strengthening dealer networks to improve customer reach and support,” Harshvardhan Sharma, the head of auto retail practice at Nomura Research Institute, says.

Over the past few months, the automaker had also laid off some 1,200 employees and contract employees, even as it has been expanding its store and service centres. Alongside, there have also been numerous top level exits in the company. In the October-December 2024 quarter, Ola reported a loss of ₹564 crore up from ₹376 crore in the same period the previous year. This loss was attributed to heavy discounts and increased spending on service quality improvements.

Meanwhile, even as he joins the exclusive billionaires club, Aggarwal is also well aware that the ground he stood on earlier isn’t all that firm anymore. At the ride-hailing business, where Ola had been the early mover in the country, the company has been steadily losing ground to Uber and Rapido. Ola’s market share stands at around 34 percent against Uber, which now controls 50 percent of the market. In the three-wheeler market, Uber has about 40 percent and Ola 26 percent of the market, while Rapido emerged as the second largest with 31 percent share.

Aggarwal had co-founded Ola Cabs in 2010, and had quickly scaled operations to over 250 towns in the country in addition to going global, with the cab operator starting business in the UK and Australia among others. Since then, it has streamlined operations, with a focus primarily on the Indian market.

Last year, asset management giant Vanguard cut the valuation of Ola Consumer to $2 billion, marking a 72 percent drop from its peak valuation. The company was valued at some $7.3 billion in 2021. While the company is expected to go for a public listing soon, the company’s revenue from operations and other income for the fiscal year ended March 2024 stood at ₹2,368 crore, down from ₹3,000 crore in FY23. Last year, in its attempt to diversify, Ola Cabs had become Ola Consumer,  with offerings including automated warehousing solutions, Ola Credit, and Ola Pay in addition to the cab hailing service.

Then, there is also the growing scrutiny over the work underway at Krutrim, Aggarwal’s AI venture, that he had been touting as India’s answer to the global AI race. While the company intends to build Krutrim as a complete stack that includes designing and developing its own chips and data centres to managing and optimising these systems, questions have been raised about the business model and its frequent shift in priorities.

This year, Aggarwal also announced a fresh ₹2,000-crore investment in Krutrim with a commitment to invest an additional ₹10,000 crore by next year. So far, the Bengaluru-based startup has secured a total funding of ₹2,320 crore ($280 million) over four rounds from investors such as Z47 (earlier Matrix Partners), the Sarin family and Jiten Vaidya, co-founder of PlanetScale, a database firm for developers.

Aggarwal has pledged as much as 8 percent of his stake in Ola Electric to fund Krutrim’s expansion, which has already launched a standalone Android app for its eponymous AI chatbot that intends to take on rivals such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot. But, with the arrival of DeepSeek and its chatbot early this year, which has even raised eyebrows in the US for its low-cost model, Krutrim definitely has its task cut out.  

Aggarwal, however, isn’t likely to give up without a fight, if his past is anything to go by. “There are two types of disruptors,” Aggarwal had said in his interview with Forbes India in 2023. “First are the cute ones who don’t threaten anybody and nobody is scared of them. Then there are others who genuinely disrupt, and the entire incumbent army stands against them. We belong to the second tribe.”