Hi Hivers,
Writing after quite a long.
OLA is an Indian multinational company founded in 2010 by Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati. It has its head quarter in the 'Indian Silicon Valley' Bangalore.
It started initially as a cab aggregator with the idea of providing people safe and easy ride for outstations. The idea came to Bhavish Aggarwal when once he himself faced issue finding a cab for a short journey.
How the very common problem people faced that time strike Bhavish as an idea to start a company and journey of this company from that idea to the path its following now is really very inspiring.
Initially Ola was known as Ola cabs and it allowed people to directly connect with drivers for their journey. They constantly worked on improving the technology and expanding the use cases giving people easy access to book rides through their mobile for different vehicle categories.
Ola competed with the very renowned and comparatively bigger brand Uber and established themselves as a reliable and competitive option for booking rides.
Ola expanded itself very fast in various cities in India and then even abroad like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, England, Australia, New Zeeland.
Ola Electric
After establishing itself in ride booking platform for different categories. Ola started a division called Ola Electric to manufacture electric vehicles.
Ola Electric was launched in 2019 with a mission to 'End ICE AGE'. ICE or IC engine are conventional internal combustion engine which works with combustion of fuel with oxidizer in a combustion chamber. All petrol/diesel or gasoline vehicles run on IC engines which burns fuel and generates lots of carbon dioxide in atmosphere. Electric vehicles are seen as a replacement for IC engines to tackle pollution by vehicles. Many countries are making policies for adoption of Electric Vehicles.
Ola electric started with manufacturing electric scooters and they soon captured major electric scooter market in India leaving many established brands far behind. They have plans to introduce electric bikes and there after electric cars also.
Another major technology breakthrough that they are working on is making fully indigenous battery with high performance. They have a large dedicated team of R&D and their more than 200 patents in EV technology reflects on their commitment in engineering the industry leading technology.
The Cell technology they are working on for their EV batteries will be a milestone for EV industry and will bring them steps ahead of their peer competition.
Bold Steps
Recently Ola announced ending its partnership with Microsoft Azure and moving all their workload to inhouse Krutrim Cloud. They also recently moved from google maps to Ola maps developed in-house.
Leaving the industry leader Microsoft and Google and developing technology inhouse to serve the purpose is quite a bold decision and needs dedication and expertise in specific domains.
It shows how far-sighted they think and how diversely they are working in different domains to create a ecosystem of their own.
They might not do as better as Microsoft/Google in specific domains in their early stage but choosing their own path and walking alone on that takes a lot of courage.
Reliance, Tata are other multi billion Indian multinational companies, but they have made their position over a long period. Ola is believed to join the elite club relatively a lot earlier.
Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, Facebook are a few names leading the technology. It might seem far-fetched now, but I believe OLA has the ability and daring of making its place in the leading technology innovators.
Thanks for reading all through it.
Keep reading, keep writing.