Founder Story · IIT Bombay · Ola · Krutrim
On 20 August 2024, twelve days after Ola Electric's IPO, Bhavish Aggarwal was briefly worth ₹21,000 crore. The stock had doubled from its ₹76 IPO price to ₹157.40. Business Today noted the number the same day (Business Today). By 6 July 2026, the same stock was at ₹42.4 and roughly ₹57,000 crore of market value had been wiped off. In between, he had a public brawl with a comedian, laid off 2,120 people across three rounds, scrapped a homegrown AI chip programme he'd announced with fanfare, and pulled his consumer AI assistant from app stores. This is the profile of the IIT Bombay 2008 CSE grad who built India's ride-hailing kingdom, listed an EV company at retail-mania valuations, and then had to explain — publicly, in real time — why the numbers keep going the wrong direction.
The IIT Bombay years: JEE, CSE, Ludhiana → Powai
Aggarwal was born on 28 August 1985 in Ludhiana, Punjab. His father, Dr. Naresh Aggarwal, is an orthopedic surgeon; his mother, Dr. Usha Aggarwal, is a pathologist (StartupTalky). Wikipedia notes he was "born and brought up in Ludhiana, Punjab" — the several floating claims of an Afghanistan childhood are unsourced and inconsistent with the primary record (Wikipedia).
His IIT Bombay credentials are anchored on the institute's own alumni council page: "B.Tech., 2008, Computer Science and Engineering" (IIT Bombay Alumni Council). His own line about those years, from the same page: "Life at IIT Bombay revolved around the peers and friends and I have a lot of memories associated with them." That's less a memoir and more a marker — but the peer group is the point. His future Ola co-founder Ankit Bhati was in the same institute (Mechanical Engineering, M.Tech CAD & Automation, 2010) — the common Ola founding story that pairs Bhavish with "an IIT BHU co-founder" is factually wrong (StartupTalky). Both are IIT Bombay.
After graduating, he joined Microsoft Research India — "He began his career with Microsoft, where he worked for two years, filed two patents and published three papers in international journals" (IIT Bombay Alumni Council). Then he quit: "the entrepreneurial itch was too hard to resist and he decided to quit his job in August 2010 and moved to Mumbai."
2010–2015: Ola Cabs, the ride he built
The story most people repeat — Bhavish took a bad cab ride, so he started Ola — is directionally right but chronologically wrong. In 2010 he first launched OlaTrip.com, a trip-planning site for the Delhi tourism market (Wikipedia — Ola Consumer). It didn't work. The pivot to cabs came in January 2011 in Bengaluru, with Ankit Bhati as co-founder.
The first cheque tells you who bet on him early. In April 2011 — four months after launch — Ola raised roughly ₹1 crore led by Rehan Yar Khan, with Anupam Mittal, Zishaan Hayath, Ramachandran Ramjee and Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal chipping in (Quartz India, angel-investor retrospective). Rehan Yar Khan, later a partner at Orios Venture Partners, ended up funding the bulk of that first round. That's the entire "who bet on Ola first" story: the Snapdeal guys and one very early Bombay angel.
The scale-up funding then came from the usual global source. SoftBank invested $210 million on 25 October 2014 — the deal that made Ola part of Masayoshi Son's global ride-hailing portfolio. Five months later, in March 2015, Ola acquired its biggest domestic rival TaxiForSure for ₹1,237 crore (US$200 million). The market-share picture right after: Ola+TFS held roughly 80%, Meru 12%, Uber India just 4% (Wikipedia — Ola Consumer).
The peak: 1.5 million drivers, ₹7.3 billion valuation
By 2019 Ola had grown to "more than 1.5 million drivers across 250 cities" (Wikipedia). FY19 revenue was ₹2,543 crore, up from ₹1,847 crore the year before; net loss narrowed but remained ₹2,592 crore (YourStory, RoC filings). December 2021 was the high-water mark: Ola raised $139 million led by Edelweiss at a $7.3 billion valuation (TechCrunch, Dec 2021). The Ola Cabs IPO was rumoured through 2020 and 2021. It never happened.
The deal that didn't happen: SoftBank's Ola-Uber merger
In March 2018, Business Today reported that SoftBank — which held roughly 26% of both Ola and Uber — was pushing for the two companies to merge in India (Business Today, March 2018). Aggarwal spent the next four years denying the rumour, eventually calling it "absolute rubbish" in a 2022 statement (Business Today, July 2022). It didn't happen. That's a load-bearing detail: Bhavish has, twice at least, refused what the bigger shareholder wanted. Once with SoftBank's merger. And later, more famously, with the Kunal Kamra apology he never gave.
2017–2024: Ola Electric, the IPO, and ₹21,000 crore for twelve days
Ola Electric was founded in 2017 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of ANI Technologies (Ola Cabs' parent). Between December 2018 and January 2019, Aggarwal personally acquired a 92.5% stake and the company was spun off (Wikipedia — Ola Electric). Delivery of the S1 and S1 Pro scooters began December 2021. Then came the moment IITians love and hate in equal measure: the IPO.
| Event | Detail | Source |
|---|---|---|
| IPO window | 2–6 Aug 2024, listed 9 Aug 2024 | Chittorgarh |
| Price band / issue size | ₹72–76 · ₹5,500 cr fresh + ₹645.56 cr OFS = ₹6,145 cr | Chittorgarh |
| Listing day (9 Aug) | Flat at ₹76 — no day-1 pop | Chittorgarh |
| Peak (20 Aug 2024) | ₹157.40 — 107% above issue price | Business Today |
| Aggarwal's paper wealth at peak | 30.02% stake ≈ ₹21,000 cr | Business Today |
| Price on 6 Jul 2026 | ₹42.4 · market cap ₹18,898 cr | Business Today, 6 Jul 2026 |
| Value destroyed from peak | ≈ ₹57,000 crore | Business Today |
The peak lasted twelve days. What broke first wasn't the balance sheet — it was the customer-service story. And what broke that was a comedian.
October 2024: The Kunal Kamra tweet that changed the story
By late September 2024, Ola Electric owners were flooding social media with videos of broken scooters queued at service centres. Comedian Kunal Kamra amplified them. Aggarwal responded personally — a decision that will be studied in Indian business schools for a decade — by attacking Kamra:
"Since you care so much Kunal Kamra, come and help us out! I'll even pay more than you earned for this paid tweet or from your failed comedy career. If you can't help, then shut up and let us fix the real customer issues." — Bhavish Aggarwal, on X, Oct 2024 (Business Standard)
Ola Electric shares dropped 8% the next Monday, marking the third consecutive day of declines (Business Standard). The comedian's tweet did not cause the market-share collapse. But it converted a service-quality issue into a founder-credibility issue in one afternoon. That's the difference.
Ola Electric's market share collapsed from roughly 26% a year earlier to "approximately 4.2% in early 2026" (Business Today). Market share doesn't get to 4.2% because of a tweet. But the direction — and the speed — was set by the founder's public choice to fight the criticism instead of absorb it.
2025–2026: Three layoff rounds, and the chip that never shipped
Three layoff rounds followed. Roughly 500 in late 2024, over 1,000 in March 2025, and 620 more in January 2026 (TechPortal, Jan 2026). Q1 FY26 revenue fell about 50% year-on-year to ₹828 crore; net loss rose 23% to ₹428 crore. FY26 revenue guidance was cut from ₹4,200–4,700 crore to ₹3,000–3,200 crore. That is not a small revision.
Meanwhile, Krutrim — the AI company Aggarwal founded in April 2023 — was pulling in the opposite direction, but ending up in a similar place. Krutrim became India's first AI unicorn on 26 January 2024 at $1 billion valuation on a $50 million round (TechCrunch). In February 2025, Aggarwal committed ₹2,000 crore personally to spin up Krutrim AI Labs and open-sourced the Krutrim-2 12B-parameter LLM. In August 2024 he had announced three chip families — Bodhi for AI, Sarv for general compute, and Ojas for edge — with Bodhi 1 scheduled for 2026 and Bodhi 2 for 2028 (BW Disrupt).
By March 2026, none of it survived. Inc42 reported the internal picture:
"The company has gone from more than 550 employees in August 2025 to roughly 150-160 as of March 2026 ... Today, Krutrim's system-on-chip (SoC) division seems to have been effectively dismantled, with the majority of the workforce from Bodhi Computing having exited ... Kruti's website and app infrastructure have stopped functioning, signalling that the company is deprioritising consumer AI products altogether." (Inc42, March 2026)
Bodhi 1 was scrapped. Kruti AI assistant was pulled from stores in April 2026. Krutrim's remaining business is now an AI-cloud provider serving enterprise GPU workloads. TechCrunch reported Krutrim did roughly ₹300 crore ($31.5M) in FY26 revenue, three times prior year, with a first-time profit and margins above 10%, serving "more than 25 enterprise customers across sectors including telecom, financial services, and healthcare" (TechCrunch, May 2026). But Inc42's separate FY25 disclosure noted that "almost 90% of the startup's total revenue" in the prior year came from Ola Group companies. Translation: Krutrim is a captive AI vendor to Bhavish's own two other companies with a nascent enterprise book on the side, being reframed as a national AI champion.
The through-line: three CEOs, one founder
What ties Ola Cabs (₹7.3B peak, no IPO, marked down to $70 million by Vanguard in 2026), Ola Electric (₹57,000 crore of shareholder value destroyed since August 2024), and Krutrim (chip programme scrapped, 70% headcount cut) is a single decision pattern: Aggarwal will not delegate the CEO seat, he will not apologise publicly, and he will not scale down his ambitions to match his execution rate. Every one of those three companies has a plausible thesis. Every one is being run by a founder holding three CEO roles simultaneously — a workload his most successful IIT-Bombay peers (from Nandan Nilekani to Vishesh Sahni) delegated years earlier.
His net worth on the Forbes 2025 World Billionaires list was $1.9 billion at rank #1763 (Forbes profile). The 2026 figure will be lower — the Ola Electric stake alone has lost most of its August-2024 value. But this is a founder who owns 30%+ of a listed EV company, controls a private ride-hailing giant, and personally funded ₹2,000 crore into an AI lab. He isn't going away. The question is whether he can still learn.
What r/developersIndia + r/india think
Three arcs dominate what actual developers, startup employees, and founder-watchers have posted about Bhavish across the last two years. The friction is the point.
Arc 1 — The Krutrim workplace signal. The single most-upvoted Bhavish-adjacent post of 2025 was a tragedy — a Krutrim employee suicide surfaced on r/developersIndia. The OP details the escalation the person went through under a specific manager and cramped workload after teammates left:
"Not sure why its not a public issue yet, a colleague of mine just gave up on his life due to extreme work pressure. He used to work in Krutrim, and with 2 other guys leading a project (even after being a freshie). The other two guys left the company, so he was cramped up with work of the other two as well. I shouldn't be taking names but this absolute shit of a manager Rajkiran Panuganti has no real clue how to man manage people. He just attends the calls, bashes people left, right and center and disappears since he lives in US." — u/too_poor_to_emigrate on r/developersIndia (1,639 upvotes, 105 comments)
Whether or not Krutrim's management team accepts the framing, 1,600+ engineers upvoting a single account is a signal you don't get from any HR survey. Similar threads on r/IndianWorkplace (u/Kirigawakazuto, 838 upvotes) and r/StartUpIndia (429 upvotes) named the same manager and the same escalation. The follow-up thread — "Happy that we created awareness and brought this to limelight" (u/Simply_Param, 258 upvotes) — shows the community treats these as connected events.
Arc 2 — The "80 hours a week" credibility gap. After Bhavish publicly championed 80-hour work weeks, r/indianstartups spotted him at a café on a Sunday afternoon. The 402-upvote post title alone did the work:
"Bhavish aggarwal chilling at a cafe in Indiranagar on a sunday afternoon. Thought he works 24/7 ??" — u/Anshul89 on r/indianstartups (402 upvotes, 82 comments)
The Krutrim launch itself was skewered on r/unitedstatesofindia under the framing "Bhavish '80 hours per week' Agarwal's brainchild Krutrim" (87 upvotes). If the founder-brand is "grind culture at national-mission scale," then the community response is: fine, but the demos have to match the rhetoric.
Arc 3 — The Kunal Kamra scoreboard. When the Kunal Kamra × Ola Electric public feud crystallised in October 2024, r/indianstartups gave it a scoreline that captured the mood cleanly:
"Kunal: 1 || Bhavish: 0" — u/Due-Raise9272 on r/indianstartups (146 upvotes, 18 comments)
The point of surfacing these isn't to pile on. Bhavish still runs a listed EV company that is genuinely trying to build something no other Indian founder has tried at his scale. The point is that the online record — from developers who work in the buildings to startup-watchers who follow every product launch — has drifted a specific distance from the founder-branding. That gap is the operating reality the 2026 turnaround has to close.
The takeaway for an IITian reading this
Bhavish's IIT Bombay 2008 CSE cohort produced a generation of founders who quietly succeeded and one very loud one who succeeded and is now, in public, learning what happens when the model breaks. There are three lessons in the arc, and none of them are the ones his cheerleaders will tell you.
One: The IPO isn't the finish line. It's the day the public starts pricing your operational reality quarter by quarter, and there is no PR spin that will hold if the service centres keep failing.
Two: The founder who cannot delegate the CEO seat is the founder whose ambitions will eventually exceed his execution rate. Aggarwal announced a chip programme, a national LLM, an AI assistant, and a 5→100 GWh gigafactory while simultaneously being sole CEO of a listed EV company losing 22 percentage points of market share. Three of those four ambitions are now dead or paused.
Three: Building at IIT-Bombay scale is unusual. Rebuilding at IIT-Bombay scale after a public collapse is rarer. Aggarwal still has the balance sheet to try. Whether he has the appetite to change how he operates is the actual question of 2026-27.
If you're an IIT-Bombay student weighing an early-career decision in July 2026 — the IIT Bombay collection is here, if you want to wear the campus even while you argue about the alumnus. The interesting Bhavish question isn't "should I bootstrap or IPO?" — Aggarwal did both, and the second one is the problem. It's "what would I refuse to do publicly if I were suddenly worth ₹21,000 crore?" That's the question with the useful answer.
By Arun Raghav S · Co-founder, IITian Vibes · Published 9 July 2026 · Last updated 9 July 2026 · Financial data as of 6 July 2026. Corrections to arun@iitianvibes.com.