Ola launched in 2010 into a country where few people own a car and everybody needs to get somewhere cheaply. Bhavish Aggarwal co-founded it and it became one of the defining names of India's startup boom.
Then he picked a much harder fight. Ola Electric was an attempt to manufacture electric scooters at Indian scale and to build the battery and component supply chains domestically rather than import them — a manufacturing problem, not a software one.
He kept picking fights with entrenched industries — taxis, then legacy autos, then Big Tech's AI.
Krutrim came next: India-focused AI models and the computing infrastructure to run them, in a race where the competitors have budgets larger than most Indian companies are worth.
A pattern runs through it. He keeps choosing entrenched incumbents and capital-hungry industries — taxis, then legacy carmakers, then Big Tech. None of the bets are settled yet, and the combination makes him the most closely watched and most combative founder in the country.