BY DIVAKAR KUMAR PANDAY
Ola Cabs (stylised as OLΛ), is an Indian ridesharing company (TNC) offering services that include peer-to-peer ridesharing, ride service hailing, taxi and food delivery. ..
Founded: 3 December 2010, Mumbai
CEO: Bhavish Aggarwal
Founders: Bhavish Aggarwal, Ankit Bhati
Headquarters location: Bengaluru
The Indian taxi hailing industry is valued to be close to $10 billion. A lucrative and relatively untapped market such as this is bound to attract a lot of attention from entrepreneurs in India and around the world. Capitalising on this opportunity, Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati launched India’s very own cab hailing startup, Ola.
The idea behind Ola came to Bhavish Aggarwal after he found himself stranded in the middle of the road on his way to Bandipur from Bangalore. Bhavish’s cab driver stopped the car in the middle of the journey and demanded a renegotiation of what Bhavish was paying and then proceeded to abandon him by the side of the road. Understanding the plight of travellers everywhere, he saw the amount of potential that an extraordinary cab booking service could have in this country. In 2010, he changed his business model from a holiday and tour planning company to a taxi hailing firm.
Joined by his co founder Ankit Bhati, Ola was launched in December 2010 as Ola Cabs. The taxi aggregator efficiently bridges the gap between cab owners and commuters adding a touch of technology to make lives and transportation easier. The company partners with drivers and cab owners to offer a variety of cab services to commuters across India. Leveraging the best of technology and building innovative solutions, the company expanded to reach 50+ cities by 2015. Serving 200,000 rides per day, which roughly translated to 6 million riders per month, the taxi hailing startup grew at a rate of over 40%.
However, the Ola journey was not as smooth as booking a cab on the app. In 2012, both the founders got a wake up call in the form of a website outage. Ankit Bhati, the Chief Technology Officer, who was in Bangalore at the time had to stay on call the entire night with the one man technology team in Mumbai to solve the issue. But that did not stop the duo. They shifted base from Mumbai to Bangalore and launched their mobile app, stepping up their game. The first version of the app, however, was a one touch destination for booking cabs.
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