Ola Consumer

Timeline

1. 2010Bhavish Aggarwal starts Olatrip.com, a trip planning website working in the Delhi region
2. 2010ANI Technologies is founded on 3 December, the company that still owns the business
3. 2011Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati launch Ola Cabs as a taxi aggregation servicebookings were taken by telephone at first
4. 2012The Ola mobile app is launched in June and bookings move to the phone
5. 2013Uber enters India and becomes the company's main rival for the next decade
6. 2014Ola is reported to hold the largest share of the Indian cab market
7. 2014Auto rickshaws are added to the platform, first as a trial in Bengaluru in November
8. 2015Radio taxi company GCabs is acquired and renamed Ola Fleet TechnologiesJanuary
9. 2015Rival TaxiForSure is bought for 1,237 crore rupees, about 200 million dollarsMarch
10. 2015Ola Cafe opens as a food delivery experiment and closes within a yearMarch
11. 2015TaxiForSure services are merged into the Ola app in June
12. 2015The service is reported to run in more than 100 cities and becomes app onlyAugust
13. 2015Ola Money is launched as the company's payments and wallet productNovember
14. 2016Bike taxis are introduced on the platform in Marchseveral states later object that they are not legal
15. 2017Foodpanda India, the struggling food delivery business, is acquired in December
16. 2017Ola Pedal, a bicycle sharing service, is launched in December
17. 2018Ola begins operating in Australia, its first overseas marketJanuary
18. 2018The service launches in New Zealand in September
19. 2019Ola starts operating in the United Kingdom in March
20. 2019Karnataka suspends the operating licence for six months over bike taxisMarch, the company says it is talking to the authorities
21. 2019Food delivery stops in June and most of about 1,500 delivery executives are laid off
22. 2020Taxi hailing starts in London with more than 25,000 drivers registeredFebruary
23. 2021The company reports its first operating profit of 90 crore rupees for the financial year 2021
24. 2021Ola Cars and the grocery business that becomes Ola Dash are launched in October and November
25. 2021Geospatial technology company GeoSpoc is acquired, the base of what becomes Ola MapsOctober
26. 2022Ola Dash is cut from nine cities to three and about 2,100 contract workers are let goApril
27. 2022Ola Dash and Ola Cars are both shut down in June
28. 2023Revenue is reported at 2,799 crore rupees for the financial year 2023 with a net loss of 772 crore rupees
29. 2024Ola announces it is leaving all international markets, the United Kingdom, Australia and New ZealandApril, with only a few days of notice to riders
30. 2024Technology workloads move from Microsoft Azure to the group's own Krutrim cloudMay
31. 2024Ola Maps is launched as an alternative to the Google Maps interface for developersJuly
32. 2024Ola Electric, the group's electric scooter maker, lists on the Indian stock exchangesAugust, its shares rose 20 per cent on the first day
33. 2024Ola Cabs is renamed Ola Consumer on 18 August

What it does

Ola Consumer is an Indian transportation company that runs the Ola app, a ride hailing service used in more than 250 cities, and a set of businesses built around the same driver network and the same customer. It is headquartered in Bangalore and is owned by ANI Technologies Private Limited, the holding company that has carried the business since it was founded.^[1][2] The core of the product is simple and has not changed since 2011: a person opens the app, enters a destination, is matched with a driver, and pays either in cash or online.^[1][2]

Around that core the company has built several other businesses. Ola Money, launched in 2015, handles payments, wallets and later credit products through Ola Financial Services.^[1] Ola Foods runs cloud kitchens, the remains of a food delivery ambition that was bought with Foodpanda India and then largely abandoned.^[1][13] Ola Fleet Technologies leases vehicles to drivers who work on the platform, which gives the company some control over the supply of cars.^[1][8] Ola Maps, launched in 2024, is a mapping product sold to developers, and it grew out of the group's own decision to stop paying for maps it could build itself.^[4]

The company also holds a stake of about 6 per cent in Ola Electric, the electric scooter manufacturer that was spun out of the same group and listed on the Indian exchanges in August 2024.^[1] That relationship matters more than its size suggests: Ola Electric was sold to drivers and to consumers who knew the brand from the cab app, and the group's founder Bhavish Aggarwal has run both companies.^[1] Where the ride hailing business is a market place that connects drivers and riders, most of the rest of the group sells something concrete to one side or the other, which is why the financials at ANI Technologies and at Ola Electric should never be read as if they were one company.^[1][5]

History

The company began as a trip planning website. In 2010 Bhavish Aggarwal, then an engineering graduate who had worked in the United States, built Olatrip.com, which helped people plan journeys in the Delhi region.^[1] The story the company tells about what came next is a road trip: a rented car, an unreliable driver and a decision to fix the problem by organising the drivers instead. In January 2011 Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati launched Ola Cabs as a taxi aggregation service, taking bookings over the telephone before the mobile app arrived in June 2012.^[1]

The early growth was in a market with several established radio taxi firms and no national aggregator. By early 2015 Ola was reported to have the largest market share in the country, ahead of TaxiForSure, Meru Cabs and Uber, which had entered India in 2013.^[1] The company bought its nearest rival in March 2015, paying 1,237 crore rupees, about 200 million dollars, for TaxiForSure in a cash and stock deal, and folded its services into the Ola app by June of the same year.^[1][6] By August 2015 the service covered more than 100 cities and had become app only, closing its website booking path.^[1]

The next five years were an expansion into everything adjacent to a cab ride. Auto rickshaws were tested in Bengaluru in November 2014 and rolled out to Delhi, Pune, Chennai and Hyderabad in the following months, bike taxis followed in March 2016, and a bicycle sharing service called Ola Pedal appeared in December 2017.^[1] Food was the biggest bet and the biggest disappointment: Ola Cafe opened in March 2015 and shut within a year, the company bought Foodpanda India in December 2017 to try again, and stopped food delivery in June 2019, letting most of about 1,500 delivery executives go while keeping Foodpanda's cloud kitchens.^[1][13]

On the financial side the company raised heavily from SoftBank and other venture investors and used the money to buy market share with discounts. The result was years of losses, followed by the first operating profit of 90 crore rupees in the financial year 2021 as the pandemic cut costs faster than it cut demand.^[1][5] The numbers published since then show a business with real revenue and a loss that is smaller than the headlines suggest.^[1]

The most recent phase has been about narrowing the focus. Ola Cars, a used and new vehicle marketplace launched in October 2021, and Ola Dash, the ten minute grocery service, were both closed in June 2022 after the company cut back the dark store network and about 2,100 contract workers.^[1][11] In April 2024 Ola announced it was pulling out of the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, its only overseas operations, giving riders only a few days of notice, and in August 2024 it renamed itself Ola Consumer to signal that the business is no longer only cabs.^[1][3] In the same year it moved its technology off Microsoft Azure onto its own cloud and replaced Google Maps with Ola Maps, two decisions that are more about cost and control than about product.^[1][4]

Ride hailing and the core business

The ride hailing business is the largest part of ANI Technologies and the reason the brand exists. Ola offers cabs at several price levels, from economy to luxury, along with auto rickshaws and bike taxis, all booked through the app and paid for in cash or online.^[1][2] The company claimed more than 150,000 bookings a day and about 60 per cent of the Indian market as far back as 2014, and by 2019 it said it had a network of more than 1.5 million drivers across 250 cities.^[1] Those are the company's own figures and should be read as such, but the scale of the network is not in dispute.^[1]

Auto rickshaws are the part of the business that reaches the largest number of riders. The trial in Bengaluru in November 2014 turned into a national service, and for many Indian commuters the auto booking inside the Ola app is the first paid digital service they use.^[1] Bike taxis, introduced in March 2016, were more controversial: several state governments ruled them illegal on the ground that two wheeler licences did not permit commercial passenger service, and Ola has argued for a national framework that would legalise them.^[1][16]

The economics of the platform rest on the driver. Ola does not employ the people who drive its cabs; it contracts with them and takes a commission on each ride, which keeps the cost base flexible and puts the company on the other side of a bargaining table from the people who generate its revenue.^[1][15] When demand fell during the pandemic the company cut incentives and the drivers absorbed the loss, a pattern the Indian labour press has documented in detail across both Ola and its rival Uber.^[15][14]

The customer side of the business has become harder as the market matured. The same ride can cost different amounts depending on the day, the time and the demand at that moment, the company's surge pricing has been criticised for years, and its refund policies have been attacked when a technical fault produces a charge that nobody can explain.^[1] These are not unusual complaints for an aggregator anywhere in the world, and they are the reason Ola's brand is loved and resented by the same people in the same week.^[1]

Ola Electric and the electric vehicle link

Ola Electric is a separate company that grew out of the same group and the same founder. It makes electric scooters, and it was sold to a market that already knew the Ola name from the cab app, with the promise of lower running costs for drivers and commuters. ANI Technologies held a stake of about 6 per cent in the electric vehicle business as of September 2019, and the two companies have shared both branding and leadership, since Bhavish Aggarwal ran both.^[1]

The link became a public market story in August 2024, when Ola Electric listed on the Indian exchanges and its shares rose 20 per cent on the first day of trading.^[1] For the parent company the listing is a marker rather than a cash event: a stake in a listed company is easier to value and easier to borrow against than a stake in a private one, and it gave the group a second, more visible face at a time when the ride hailing business was shrinking its footprint.^[1]

The relationship also runs the other way. The closure of Ola Cars in June 2022 was explained at the time by saying that its infrastructure, technology and capabilities would be repurposed towards growing Ola Electric's sales and service network, which is a plain description of a group deciding where to put its people.^[1][11] Anyone reading the two companies together should keep the accounts apart, because Ola Electric carries manufacturing, warranty and regulatory risk that a marketplace does not, and ANI Technologies only holds a stake.^[1][12]

Ola Financial Services and Ola Money

Ola Money was launched in November 2015 as a mobile payments and wallet product, aimed first at riders who did not want to pay a driver in cash.^[1] It sits inside Ola Financial Services, which sells a wider set of credit and insurance products: buy now pay later, insurance, co-branded credit cards and vehicle loans, all in partnership with banks and non banking finance companies rather than off its own balance sheet.^[1][9]

The credit card is the clearest example of how the model works. Ola launched a co-branded card with SBI Card in 2019, which gave the platform a share of card economics without it having to hold banking capital or manage credit risk on its own books.^[1][10] In 2022 the financial services arm raised about 200 crore rupees and its chief executive Nitin Gupta left the company, a reminder that these businesses have been run as investments with their own leadership rather than as features of the cab app.^[9]

For a reader trying to understand the group, Ola Financial Services is best thought of as the part that tries to make money between rides, from the drivers who need vehicle finance and the riders who want credit.^[1][9] It is also the part most exposed to rules, because lending and insurance distribution in India are licensed activities, and the company has had to build those partnerships carefully rather than simply adding a button to an app.^[1]

Ola Foods and cloud kitchens

Ola Foods is what remains of the company's attempt to sell food. The first effort was Ola Cafe in March 2015, closed in March 2016.^[1] The second began in December 2017 with the acquisition of Foodpanda India, into which the company said it would put up to 200 million dollars, and for a year orders grew on the back of discounts before falling sharply in early 2019.^[1][13]

The end of delivery came in June 2019, when Ola stopped the service and let go of most of its roughly 1,500 delivery executives, keeping Foodpanda's cloud kitchen operation alive.^[1][13] That kitchen business became Ola Foods, which by 2021 was running more than 50 cloud kitchens in six cities behind brands such as Khichdi Experiment, its best known label.^[1] The company later held back its plans for quick service restaurants and said it would concentrate on meal kits and private label brands instead.^[1]

The food story is worth reading carefully because it shows how the group behaves when a market turns. Delivery was expensive to run, the discounts were bought with investor money, and the decision to keep the kitchens while dropping the delivery army was a way of staying in food without paying for the last mile.^[1] For a reader looking at the business today, Ola Foods is small, unglamorous and mostly about selling food that the company itself prepares, which is a very different business from competing with Swiggy and Zomato for the consumer's lunch.^[1][13]

Ola Maps and Krutrim

Ola Maps began with an acquisition. In October 2021 the company bought GeoSpoc, a Pune based geospatial technology firm, and the founder wrote at the time that the acquisition would help convert satellite imagery into web maps.^[1][7] Almost three years later, in July 2024, Ola launched Ola Maps as a product for developers, positioned as an Indian alternative to the Google Maps interface, and Aggarwal publicly urged Indian developers to use home grown tools.^[4][1]

The move is as much about cost as about patriotism. Every ride on the platform needs a map, a route and an estimate, and paying a foreign provider for those calls was one of the company's larger software bills.^[4] Building the map in house turns a recurring cost into a fixed one and gives the group a product it can sell to others, which is why mapping shows up in the same breath as the cloud migration.^[1]

The migration came in May 2024, when Ola moved its technology workloads off Microsoft Azure and onto Krutrim, the group's own cloud platform.^[1] The two decisions, maps and cloud, are the clearest expression of the group's stated ambition to own its own infrastructure, and they also carry risk: a home built map and cloud must reach commercial quality quickly, because the ride hailing app depends on both every minute of the day.^[1][4]

Ola Fleet and the driver network

Ola Fleet Technologies is the part of the group that owns cars. It began with the acquisition of the radio taxi company GCabs in January 2015, which was renamed Ola Fleet, and it leases vehicles to drivers who work on the platform.^[1] The company put about 50 crore rupees into the leasing unit in 2017, which is a modest figure next to what it spent on marketing but a meaningful one for a business that needs cars to be available in cities where drivers cannot finance them.^[1][8]

The logic of owning the vehicle is straightforward. A driver who cannot afford a car cannot join the platform, so leasing expands the supply of drivers; and a driver who owes money on a lease is more likely to keep driving through the months when incentives are cut.^[1][8] During the pandemic the company waived lease rentals for driver partners for a period, which was both a public relations decision and a recognition that the fleet and the driver's ability to pay are the same problem.^[1]

The fleet business also gives the group something to do with the cars that come off lease and with the electric vehicles that the sibling company makes.^[1] That is why the closure of the used car marketplace in 2022 was not the end of the group's interest in vehicle commerce, only the end of a consumer facing attempt at it.^[1][11]

Revenue and financials

The published numbers for the holding company tell a story of shrinking losses and slower growth. Revenue for the financial year 2023 was reported at 2,799 crore rupees, with a net loss of 772 crore rupees, against a much larger accumulated loss in the years before.^[1] The company's first operating profit of 90 crore rupees came in the financial year 2021, at the height of the pandemic, when demand fell but so did the cost of running promotions and a large part of the fleet.^[1][5] Revenue had shrunk by 63 per cent in that same year, which is why the profit line was celebrated less than it was examined.^[1]

Every one of these figures needs a year attached, and they should not be mixed. The 90 crore rupee operating profit is for the financial year 2021, the 2,799 crore rupee revenue and the 772 crore rupee net loss are for the financial year 2023, and the roughly 3,000 employee count is from 2020 rather than today.^[1] The company is private, so it publishes nothing itself and the numbers circulate through filings and business press reporting, which is why the same year can appear with slightly different figures in different publications.^[1][5]

The shape of the accounts explains the strategy. Ride hailing revenue is a commission on each trip, so it grows with trips rather than with the size of the user base, and the company can only improve the margin by taking a larger share, cutting incentives, or selling something else to the same driver and rider.^[1][15] The later years are that third path: loans, insurance, mapping and cloud services sold off the same relationships, with the international operations dropped in 2024 because they added cost without adding scale.^[3]

What is not visible in any of these numbers is the size of the driver payouts that flow through the platform, which are far larger than the company's own revenue.^[15] A directory page cannot turn a private company's disclosure into a full balance sheet, and the honest reading of Ola's financial position is that the ride hailing business is much closer to profitability than it was in 2016, while the group still carries the cost of several bets it has not yet proved.^[1][5]

Shareholding and ownership

ANI Technologies is a private company and its shareholders are a mix of founders, employees and venture funds, with SoftBank among the largest investors and a group of others that has included Tiger Global and Steadview.^[1] The company has said little about its cap table since the last large funding years, and the shareholder register is not public, so any precise percentage quoted about ownership should be treated with suspicion unless it comes from a filing.^[1]

What is disclosed is different and easier to check. The 6 per cent stake in Ola Electric is the group's most visible holding, recorded in the Wikipedia entry for the company as a September 2019 position and unchanged in the reporting since.^[1] The parent owns the operating subsidiaries outright, Ola Fleet Technologies, Ola Financial Services and Ola Foods, and it is the entity that signs the agreements with drivers and the contracts with the banks.^[1][9]

The ownership question that matters to a reader is who controls the company. Bhavish Aggarwal is the co-founder and chief executive and has remained in place through every phase of the business, including the years when the group shut down units and left markets, and he runs Ola Electric as well.^[1] That concentration of control in one person is the single most important fact about how the group makes decisions, and it is why the strategy reads as a series of large, personal bets rather than a portfolio managed by committee.^[1][3]

Employees and offices

Ola's head office is in Koramangala, Bengaluru, in Karnataka, where the company moved from Delhi as the business grew, and the address on its own accounts is the fourth block of 17th Main on 100 Feet Road.^[1] The published employee count was about 3,000 people in 2020, well before the closure of Ola Cars, Ola Dash and the food delivery operation, so the current number is likely to be smaller and is not separately disclosed.^[1]

The bigger workforce is not on the payroll. Drivers who work through the platform are contractors, not employees, and by 2019 the company said it had more than 1.5 million of them.^[1][15] That distinction decides who carries the cost of a slow week, and it is the subject of the labour criticism the company has faced, since a contractor has none of the protections of a worker and no claim on the platform when incentives are cut.^[15][14]

The offices themselves are unremarkable for an Indian consumer technology company: a head office in Bengaluru, teams that support 250 cities remotely, and no large second campus in any other state.^[1] What is unusual is that the group runs a cloud platform and a mapping team from the same building as a cab dispatch operation, which is a much wider range of skills than a ride hailing company usually needs.^[1][4]

Acquisitions and joint ventures

• GCabs, a radio taxi company, acquired in January 2015 and renamed Ola Fleet Technologies, which leases cabs to drivers on the platform.^[1]
• TaxiForSure, the company's nearest rival, bought in March 2015 for 1,237 crore rupees, roughly 200 million dollars, and merged into the app by June of that year.^[1][6]
• Geotagg, a trip planning company, acquired for an undisclosed sum in November 2015.^[1]
• Foodpanda India, the Indian arm of the food delivery business, acquired in December 2017, with delivery stopped in June 2019 and the cloud kitchens retained.^[1][13]
• Ridlr, a public transport ticketing app, acquired in April 2018.^[1]
• A stake in the scooter rental startup Vogo, first through a Series A in August 2018 and then with a further 100 million dollars invested in December of the same year.^[1]
• GeoSpoc, a Pune based geospatial company, acquired in October 2021, which became the technology behind Ola Maps.^[1][7]
• Ola Cars, launched in October 2021 as a vehicle marketplace rather than an acquisition and closed in June 2022, with its people and technology moved to Ola Electric.^[1][11]

Competition

Ola's oldest and most consequential competitor is Uber, which entered India in 2013 and fought the company for the same riders and the same drivers for more than a decade.^[1] The two have been compared in every funding cycle, criticised in the same labour reporting and expected to merge at least once, and Uber's decision to keep investing in India after Ola left its overseas markets left the competition unchanged in the one market both care about most.^[1][15]

The more recent challenge comes from below. Bike taxi platforms and auto rickshaw aggregators, Rapido among them, have taken a large share of the short trip market that Ola and Uber once divided, and their lower cost base lets them charge less for the journeys that were never very profitable for a cab company.^[1] The quick commerce companies have also become competitors for the same driver, because a delivery rider can earn through the day while a cab driver waits for a booking.^[1]

In payments and financial services Ola Money competes with the wallets and lending apps that reached scale in the years when rides were growing, and in cloud and mapping it competes with the foreign providers it used to buy from.^[1][4] The company's answer in each case has been to own the infrastructure and sell the surplus, which is a demanding strategy for a company whose main business is still matching a driver with a passenger in a city with too much traffic.^[1]

Controversies and criticism

The most serious criticisms of Ola are about how it treats the people who drive for it. Drivers protested outside the company's Hyderabad office in December 2016 demanding more transparency on payments, and from January 2017 the company was criticised for cutting driver incentives repeatedly, which reduced what driver partners earned each month.^[1][14] Both Ola and Uber have been accused of attracting drivers with bonuses and then reducing them once the driver had taken on a vehicle and a loan, and both treat drivers as contractors rather than employees, which removes the obligations that would normally follow.^[1][15]

Safety has been a persistent theme. Reporting on app based cab aggregators in India has counted eleven murders and more than ninety kidnappings and robberies of drivers by criminals posing as passengers, with cases reported in Pune and Delhi.^[1] In early 2015 the Delhi transport authorities questioned the credibility of drivers across the aggregators and found that around 80 per cent of them did not hold permits to run commercial transport in the city, an outcome that led to verification rules the whole industry now works under.^[1]

The technology has failed in public more than once. In August 2016 customer names, phone numbers and addresses in Bangalore were sent as text messages to a stranger in Chennai, and the company was reported to have ignored the warnings until the media covered the breach three weeks later.^[1] In January 2020 a glitch sent ride notifications to users who had not booked anything, and in some cases cancelling the notification triggered a new booking.^[1][13] The refund policy and surge pricing have drawn complaints for years, including the observation that the same journey can cost different amounts depending on the day, the demand and the profile of the rider.^[1]

Regulators and advertisers have had their turns as well. Karnataka suspended the company's operating licence for six months in March 2019 for running bike taxis under a licence that only covered four wheelers, and in 2016 an advertisement was withdrawn after protests over its portrayal of women.^[1][16] Finally, research reported in the entry has argued that the service adds to congestion in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi, in part by taking trips that would otherwise have been made on public transport such as the metro.^[1]

Reading the numbers

Four numbers describe Ola Consumer. Revenue of 2,799 crore rupees for the financial year 2023 says the company is a real business with real scale. A net loss of 772 crore rupees for the same year says it still spends more than it earns, though far less than in the years when it was buying market share with discounts. A footprint of more than 250 Indian cities says it kept the distribution it built. And a stake of about 6 per cent in a listed electric vehicle maker says that a large part of the group's future value now sits outside the ride hailing company.^[1]

The single most useful habit for a reader is to separate the three businesses that share the Ola name. ANI Technologies runs the app and the marketplaces and carries the losses. Ola Electric manufactures scooters and publishes its own accounts as a listed company. The mapping and cloud businesses sit inside the group and are young enough that no separate numbers exist for them.^[1][4] Confusing the three is how a reader ends up believing that a scooter maker's factory costs are the cab company's problem.^[1]

The direction of travel is clear even without a full balance sheet. The company left three overseas markets in 2024, shut two consumer businesses in 2022, and moved its technology in house in the same year, all of which are cost decisions rather than growth decisions.^[1][3] A ride hailing firm that stops expanding and starts owning its infrastructure is usually one that expects the next phase of its story to be about margin rather than about cities served, and the 2024 renaming to Ola Consumer says the same thing: the company wants the value of the customer relationship, not only the value of the trip.^[1]

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