Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal floats new firm, to enter AI space

Bhavish Aggarwal, founder and CEO of Ola Cabs and Ola Electric, is getting into a new business. He has floated a new company, and this would possibly be in the artificial intelligence (AI) space, according to two top sources.

This April, Aggarwal registered a new company named Krutrim SI Designs Private Ltd.

He and Tenneti Venugopala Krishnamurthy are the only two directors of the new company, which was incorporated on April 5, shows documents sourced from Ministry of Corporate Affairs by business-intelligence site Tofler.

Sources say Aggarwal will soon close funding for the new company from investors.

Krishnamurthy, commonly known as TVG, is Aggarwal’s longtime advisor and is a member of the board of all his companies. Aggarwal has his flagship company ANI Technologies that runs Ola Cabs; Ola Electric Mobility, which runs the electric-vehicle business; Ola Elelctric Technologies, which focuses on research and development; Ola Financial Services, which was fully acquired by ANI Technologies, show the documents.

Krishnamurthy is a director on the board of all these companies and an additional company, Ola Electric Charging Pvt Ltd, which is a subsidiary of Ola Electric Mobility, the documents show.

Curiously, unlike Aggarwal’s other companies, the new company Krutrim does not have ‘Ola’ in its registration name. The sources cited earlier say Aggarwal may have received investment commitment for this new AI venture from Matrix Partners, the venture capital firm which is an early investor in Ola Cabs.

Matrix Partners and Aggarwal have formed a close partnership over the years with the former investing in all Ola group companies in the launch phase. Matrix had earlier invested in Ola Electric, Ola Financial Services and Avail Finance, which was run by Aggarwal’s brother Ankush Aggarwal. Avail Finance was later acquired by Ola Cabs.

It appears Aggarwal, who is in the middle of a fundraise at Ola Electric and is charting a course for its public listing next year, will parallelly work on getting an AI venture off the ground. He jumped on the quick commerce bandwagon in 2022 by launching Ola Dash.

A few months prior to that, he had launched a used-car service, Ola Cars. Around that time, strong interest from venture capital investors had helped four used-car startups to become unicorns. Ola Cars and Ola Dash, which were launched as verticals of Ola Cabs, were quickly folded.

Aggarwal of late showed interest in AI. He has been regularly tweeting about AI and has said India should take lead in adopting AI technologies. According to one of the sources, Aggarwal recently went to Taiwan, which is a major hub for chips for AI computing systems.