🇮🇳 Bhavish Aggarwal

He was born in 1985 in Ludhiana, the industrial heart of Punjab. His father is an orthopaedic surgeon, his mother a biochemist. He was a quiet, mathematical child who left Ludhiana for the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2004 and graduated with a degree in computer science in 2008. He took the kind of job most of his class did not refuse: Microsoft Research India in Bangalore, where he co-authored patents and peer-reviewed papers before deciding, in 2010, that he wanted to build something that lived outside a laboratory.

His first attempt was Olatrip — a small holiday-booking site that did not work. The pivot came after the highway argument. He recruited his classmate Ankit Bhati as co-founder and chief technology officer and the company that would become Ola Cabs took shape from December 2010 into early 2011. The early model was simple: aggregate small private taxi fleets in Bangalore and Mumbai, list them on a mobile app, and offer a fixed metered price. Indians had never seen this before. The drivers had never seen it either; the early days involved physically chasing fleet owners around Andheri car parks with printed contracts.

Tiger Global led a funding round in 2014 and the company exploded across Indian cities. Ola added auto-rickshaws — a category every Indian had used and no app had digitised — in 2014, becoming the first mobility platform anywhere to formalise the three-wheeler trade. Aggarwal expanded into bike taxis, into ride-share pools, into outstation rentals, into food (Ola Café and later Foodpanda India), and into electric vehicles. Not every bet worked. The food business closed within a few years; the international expansion into Australia and the United Kingdom retreated quickly. The mobility core kept growing.

By 2017 the Uber-versus-Ola fight in Indian cities was the most expensive subsidy war the country had ever seen. Aggarwal, often the only Indian founder in the room when SoftBank and Tiger sat with Uber's leadership, refused to sell. He has said, with the bluntness for which he is now known, that he saw no reason why an Indian company should hand its home market to an American one.

The Ola Electric pivot of 2017–2019 was the bet that defined his second decade. He acquired Etergo, a Dutch electric-scooter startup, and announced plans for a 'Futurefactory' near Krishnagiri in Tamil Nadu — at planned full build-out, one of the largest scooter factories in the world. The first Ola S1 scooter was unveiled in August 2021. Production teething problems, fires, recalls, and public-relations crises followed in waves, and the company also became, for a time, the best-selling electric two-wheeler in India.

Ola Electric's IPO in August 2024 was the country's biggest electric-vehicle listing. The stock listed strongly and gave Aggarwal, on paper, a fortune comparable to those of his older industrialist peers. Critics noted persistent losses, quality complaints, and a sharp post-listing correction. Aggarwal answered, characteristically, by promising more capacity and longer time horizons.

He launched Krutrim, his artificial-intelligence venture, in late 2023, training large language models in Indic languages. Krutrim became, in early 2024, one of India's first AI unicorns, valued at a billion dollars within months of formal launch. He has been outspoken — sometimes inflammatorily so — about Indian sovereignty in AI infrastructure, criticising domestic dependence on Western cloud providers and announcing plans to move large parts of his group's tech stack onto Indian-built infrastructure.

He lives in Bangalore. He has been, by all accounts, a demanding boss; long-time executives have departed, the company has weathered LinkedIn storms, and he has acknowledged, in occasional moments of public reflection, that he is still learning how to lead. He is, in 2026, perhaps the most polarising founder of his generation: revered for what he built, criticised for how he runs it, and respected, even by his detractors, for the simple fact that the Punjabi boy who stepped out of a taxi on a Karnataka highway built three multi-billion-dollar companies in fifteen years.