Bhavish Aggarwal CEO of Ola Cabs
Bhavish Aggarwal (born 28 August 1985) is an Indian entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Ola Cabs founder of Ola Electric and the founder of OlaKrutrim a Large language model, an Artificial intelligence (AI) company which became India’s first AI unicorn at a $1 billion valuation.
Early life of Bhavishya Aggarwal
Aggarwal was born and brought up in Ludhiana, Punjab, in a Punjabi Hindu family. He completed a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2008. He started his career with Microsoft Research India as a research intern and later got reinstated as an assistant researcher.
Career of Bhavishya Aggarwal
He began his career with Microsoft, where he worked for two years, filed two patents and published three papers in international journals. In January 2011 he co-founded Ola Cabs with Ankit Bhati in Bengaluru.
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Ola Cabs
The idea for a cab company struck Aggarwal when he had a bad experience with a taxi, which led him and Ankit Bhati to co-found Ola Cabs in 2010.In May 2020, Ola Cabs announced a huge layoff of around 5000 employees in a move to survive the economic repercussions of COVID-19. It had suffered an overwhelming loss of revenue by about 95%.
In a webinar addressed to the students of Bennet University, Bhavish said that the COVID-19 pandemic was about to accelerate the innovations in technologies. He claimed that the markets might move towards more car rentals and subscription-based ownerships of cars.
In April 2022, An internal email to Ola employees was sent out, announcing that Bhavish Aggarwal would be stepping down from day-to-day operations of the company to focus on the future of Ola’s venture into electric vehicles and quick-commerce.
Controversy of Bhavish Aggarwal
In May 2024, Bhavish made several transphobic remarks via his Twitter/X account. Hoping that this “pronoun illness” doesn’t reach India. Many “big city schools” in India are now teaching it to kids. Also see many CVs with pronouns these days. Need to know where to draw the line in following the west blindly!— Bhavish Aggarwal
He termed gender pronouns as a “western illness”, which caused an online backlash on Twitter with netizens labelling him as homophobic and conservative.
LinkedIn removed his homophobic and transphobic posts on “gender illness” citing community guidelines , following which Ola Cabs switched cloud services from Microsoft Azure.
Bhavish Aggarwal criticized LinkedIn on Thursday when the job-focused social networking site deleted his post about “pronoun illness.” “This post of mine was about YOUR AI imposing a political ideology on Indian users that’s unsafe, sinister,” he said on X, the former Twitter platform.
The conflict started earlier this week when LinkedIn’s AI referred to Aggarwal using “they” instead of “he” pronoun, prompting him to question the AI’s neutrality and accusing the platform of pushing a political agenda. Aggarwal’s critique extends beyond personal grievance, highlighting a broader concern about the technological influence exerted by foreign corporations over Indian users.In a post that quickly went viral, Aggarwal claimed, “Dear LinkedIn, this post of mine was about YOUR AI imposing a political ideology on Indian users that’s unsafe, sinister.
Rich of you to call my post unsafe! This is exactly why we need to build our own tech and AI in India. Else we’ll just be pawns in others political objectives.” He also shared a screenshot of LinkedIn’s notification that cited a violation of their “Professional Community Policies” as the reason for the removal.
Aggarwal has been a vocal advocate for developing indigenous technology to ensure India’s autonomy in the digital world. His company, Ola, launched its own AI platform, Krutrim, last year, aiming to rival global tech giants. “We are building our own technology to do energy management to make the most efficient data centers in the world.
I am willing to compete with Microsoft, Google, or whoever to say, we will do better than them,” Aggarwal stated, underscoring his commitment to technological independence.
