One of the Youngest Billionaires in the World to Double Prosperity Following the Ola IPO

Just two years ago, Bhavish Aggarwal faced one of his most difficult challenges. A video on social media showed an Ola Electric Mobility Ltd. vehicle catching fire in the Indian city of Pune, raising questions about whether his gamble on the world's largest e-scooter manufacturing will pay off.

The outspoken founder, who has garnered comparisons to Elon Musk, has bounced back. Now, the company's public offering will solidify his status as one of the world's youngest billionaires.

Aggarwal would add $1.2 billion to his wealth if his SoftBank Group Corp.-backed Ola Electric were listed in Mumbai on Friday at the low end of the price range of 72 rupees ($0.86) per share, giving the entrepreneur a net worth of $2.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Ola Electric did not immediately reply to demands for information about Aggarwal's net worth.

Despite having yet to earn a profit since its inception in Bengaluru in 2017, Ola Electric is one of several electric vehicle-related companies aiming to raise funds in India's public market, capitalizing on the demand for alternative fuels in one of the busiest countries for new share offerings. According to the offer document, the company generated a net loss of 14.7 billion rupees in the fiscal year ending March 2023.

"I believe the EV story began three years ago, when we launched our product," Aggarwal remarked during a press conference in Mumbai in late July.

Ola Electric became a unicorn — a firm valued at $1 billion — just two years after its establishment, despite not having deployed a single scooter, due to early backing from SoftBank and Tiger Global Management. In 2021, when India's green infrastructure was in its infancy, Aggarwal planned to develop the world's premier "urban mobility EV company," he said.

However, the firm had some early hiccups. Shortly after launching its electric two-wheelers in 2021, it suffered a big setback when Ola scooters were involved in a series of high-profile EV battery fires around the nation.

Following the events, the business recalled more than 1,400 scooters.

Taking On Tesla

Aggarwal is a serial entrepreneur who has founded firms in a variety of fields, including online payments and artificial intelligence.

Aggarwal had already joined an elite club before his electric vehicle firm went public. Bloomberg's wealth index of the world's top 500 billionaires includes only seven individuals under the age of 40, excluding Meta Platforms Inc. founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, both of whom turned 40 in May.

Aggarwal represents Prime Minister Narendra Modi's more confident and aggressive India. Never one to shy away from expressing his views, Aggarwal appeared to cheer Tesla Inc.'s decision last month not to invest in India, stating in a post on X that "this is Tesla's loss, not India's."

He seemed to enjoy battling against global behemoths like Musk's EV endeavor on his own field. As he stated in an interview with Bloomberg last year, "Tesla is for the West, Ola is for the rest."

After graduating from one of India's premier technology-focused colleges, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Aggarwal began working at Microsoft Research India before launching his own firm in 2010. Ola Cabs, formerly known as ANI Technologies Pvt., began as a ride-hailing app to compete with Uber Technologies Inc., but quickly expanded into online payments and food delivery.

He launched Krutrim in 2023, and it became India's first $1 billion AI firm in January of this year. Krutrim aims to construct big language models, data centers, and eventually servers and supercomputers for the AI ecosystem.

Nitin Pangarkar, associate professor of strategy and policy at the National University of Singapore, noted that all of his companies are in technology-driven industries and generate data that can be utilized by his other enterprises. "But the attention given to the businesses could be an issue."

According to Tracxn Technologies Ltd. statistics, he has stakes in Ola Cabs and Krutrim, as well as unknown amounts in tea chain Chaayos and news portal YourStory as an angel investor.

He is an outspoken backer of Modi's efforts to increase domestic manufacturing, and he frequently uses social media and blogs to discuss how his companies can help to India's economic progress.

In May, he abandoned Microsoft Azure's cloud services in favor of his company's and switched to Krutrim cloud when a LinkedIn chatbot used gender-neutral pronouns with him. Criticizing Microsoft for "pronoun illness" on his X account, he stated that Indians must move away from Western notions of diversity, fairness, and inclusion and establish their own norms.

"He's like India's Elon Musk," Pangarkar said. "Brash, abrasive, and all that. However, this has not prevented Musk from succeeding.