Bhavish Aggarwal was once celebrated as India’s Elon Musk—a visionary entrepreneur who disrupted markets and built billion-dollar companies. Today, that same ambition and confidence are widely viewed as his greatest liabilities. This comprehensive case study explores the troubling pattern of over-promising and under-delivering that defines his entrepreneurial journey, from the triumph of Ola Cabs to the crashing stock of Ola Electric and the cash-burn crisis of Krutrim AI.
The Rise of Ola Cabs: A Game-Changing Success Story
The Birth of an Idea That Worked
In 2010, Bhavish Aggarwal experienced a moment of frustration that sparked a revolutionary idea. During a road trip from Bangalore to Bandipur, his taxi driver stopped mid-journey and began haggling over the fare, leaving him stranded and frustrated. This personal inconvenience crystallized a business opportunity: India desperately needed a reliable, transparent, and efficient cab service. Working with his co-founder Ankit Bhati, Aggarwal launched Ola Cabs in January 2011, initially operating from a modest one-bedroom flat in Powai, Mumbai. His family initially worried that this would become just another travel agency, with his father not speaking to him for six months due to the perceived risk.
Ola’s early strategy was brilliant in its simplicity. While the company initially allowed customers to book taxis over the phone, it launched its mobile app in June 2012—a move that transformed the entire Indian transportation industry. What made Ola truly disruptive was its focus on affordability and accessibility. Taxis, previously seen as luxury services for the wealthy, became accessible to everyday commuters. The company expanded to over 2,500 cities and built a fleet of over 1 million driver partners, ferrying 2 million people daily by 2018.
Dominating the Indian Market
By 2015-2016, Ola had cemented its position as India’s largest ride-hailing platform. The company reported a 70% jump in revenue in the year ended March 2017, posting revenues of $190 million compared to $112 million in the previous year. At this time, Ola operated in 110 cities with 14 service categories, creating a network effect that was difficult for competitors to replicate.
Ola Electric IPO Stock Price Decline: August 2024 – November 2025
Ola’s first-mover advantage proved invaluable. The company had launched two years before Uber entered India, giving it deep market knowledge and established driver networks. During the fierce competition between 2015-2017, both companies were burning massive amounts of capital to capture market share. In the first half of 2015-16, while Ola’s share increased by 2-3%, Uber’s share jumped 20-22%, showing the aggressive challenge to Ola’s dominance. However, both companies experienced significant losses; in FY16, Ola incurred a consolidated loss before tax of $360 million—a price paid for market dominance through subsidies and aggressive pricing.
The Pivot: Ola Electric and the Promise of Revolution
The Electric Vehicle Opportunity
By 2017, as Ola Cabs revenues plateaued amid intense competition with Uber, Bhavish Aggarwal identified what seemed like the perfect next frontier: the electric vehicle revolution. Global trends were shifting toward sustainable mobility, and India was emerging as a massive untapped market for electric two-wheelers. Aggarwal founded Ola Electric in 2017, and the company achieved unicorn status by 2019, becoming one of the fastest unicorns in Indian startup history.
The narrative was compelling: Ola Electric would revolutionize personal mobility in India with affordable, high-performance electric scooters. The company promised to build the world’s second-largest EV factory and produce premium-quality vehicles at mass-market prices. This was meant to be the vehicle (pun intended) for Aggarwal to cement his legacy as a true disruptor.
The S1 Pro Launch: Hype Over Reality
In August 2021, Ola Electric unveiled its first product: the S1 and S1 Pro electric scooters. The response was immediate and overwhelming. Over 100,000 people pre-ordered within 24 hours. Aggarwal promised deliveries by the end of 2021, and the hype reached fever pitch. Media outlets, tech blogs, and enthusiasts celebrated what seemed like India’s answer to Tesla’s disruption in the EV market.
However, when deliveries began in December 2021, a different story emerged. Customers received scooters with severe delays, manufacturing defects including dents, scratches, and uneven panel gaps, software bugs causing unexpected malfunctions, and critically, battery fires. The most alarming incident occurred on March 26, 2022, in Pune, when one customer’s new vehicle spontaneously caught fire just after being parked. By April 2022, Ola Electric was forced to recall 1,441 units for diagnostics and repairs, making this one of the most significant recalls in Indian automotive history.
Electric Two-Wheeler Market Share in India – September 2025
The manufacturing reality became increasingly clear: Ola Electric had prioritized marketing and pre-orders over actual product development and quality assurance. Rather than addressing these fundamental issues, the company attempted to minimize the recalls, calling them “pre-emptive measures” rather than safety-driven responses. This defensive posture only worsened the public relations crisis as customers shared their nightmarish experiences on social media. Photos of scooters being transported on donkeys and stacked in repair centers became symbols of corporate dysfunction.
The Manufacturing Nightmare and Safety Concerns
What had become a nightmare for customers included:
- Faulty charging systems that couldn’t reach full capacity
- Battery range significantly lower than advertised
- Multiple software updates that never fully resolved problems
- Inadequate customer service with extended repair timelines
- Additional recalls in March 2023 affecting 200,000 units for front fork arm replacements
The company eventually acknowledged upgrading the front fork design, though it continued to deny any design safety issues despite investigations by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways. The accumulated effect of these issues devastated Ola Electric’s brand reputation in ways that would prove difficult to recover from.
Leadership Crisis and Organizational Dysfunction
The Shift in Focus and Mass Firings
As the scandal surrounding Ola Electric deepened in 2022, Bhavish Aggarwal made a controversial decision: he shifted his full attention from Ola Cabs operations to Ola Electric, effectively abandoning the daily operations of the more profitable cab business. Simultaneously, the company underwent massive restructuring. In July 2022, Ola Electric shut down three verticals (Used Cars, Cloud Kitchen, and Grocery Delivery) and laid off approximately 1,000 employees.
What followed revealed a troubling pattern in Aggarwal’s management approach. Rather than accepting responsibility for the failures, the company removed leaders associated with the troubled scooter project. Reports emerged of a toxic workplace culture where Aggarwal was known for:
- Publicly berating team members
- Making unrealistic demands without providing adequate resources
- Creating a culture of fear rather than innovation
- Making reactive decisions driven by emotional responses
The cycle of layoffs continued. By November 2024, the company was laying off more than 500 additional employees as part of restructuring aimed at achieving profitability. By March 2025, the number had grown to over 1,000 jobs being cut across multiple departments. This wasn’t addressing the root problems; it was managing symptoms through workforce reduction.
Enter Krutrim AI: The Ego Project Reaches New Heights
The Latest Pivot: AI as the Ultimate Frontier
While Ola Electric was still reeling from its public relations crisis, Bhavish Aggarwal identified a new wave that would define the next era: artificial intelligence. In December 2023, he launched Krutrim (meaning “artificial” in Sanskrit), an AI startup aiming to build large language models optimized for Indian languages and contexts.
The ambitions were staggering. Krutrim claimed that its models would:
- Outperform GPT-4 in Indian language processing with 7-billion and 12-billion parameter models
- Outperform Llama 2 in English
- Create India’s first entirely homegrown supercomputer and AI infrastructure
- Develop India-centric large language models
- Design custom silicon chips through the acquisition of Bodhi Innovations
In January 2024, just one month after its launch, Krutrim raised $50 million from Matrix Partners India and achieved unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation. This made it India’s first AI unicorn and the fastest unicorn to achieve this milestone. The narrative was once again compelling: India would no longer depend on Western AI, and Krutrim would lead this indigenous revolution.
Bhavish Aggarwal’s Three Ventures: A Comparative Analysis
Krutrim’s Bold Claims vs. Reality: The Pattern Repeats
Here’s where the destructive pattern became undeniable: Krutrim made the same over-promises that Ola Electric had made, but with even grander ambitions and less infrastructure to back them up. When users actually tried Krutrim’s AI model, the reality didn’t match the hype:
- Model quality was significantly below claimed benchmarks
- Some users alleged the platform was essentially a wrapper around existing models like GPT, with merely a changed interface
- No major enterprise or customer adoption occurred despite the large claims
- The promised “India-first” advantages were nowhere to be found in practice
By 2024, the company had become increasingly focused on cloud infrastructure services for its parent companies rather than on developing world-class AI models. The company reduced its headcount from an initial 250 R&D experts to 150, and instead of working on AI model development, many were working on cloud infrastructure to support Ola Electric and Ola Cabs’ internal operations.
The Cash Burn Crisis and Personal Stakes
By February 2025, Bhavish Aggarwal had personally injected ₹2,000 crore ($230 million) into Krutrim through a mix of equity and debt, pledging his Ola Electric shares as collateral. This was particularly troubling because:
The initial $50 million funding, with a monthly burn rate of $4-5 million, would exhaust capital in approximately 10 months. Building a competitive large language model requires billions in compute infrastructure, GPU resources, and top-tier AI talent. The AI talent market has become prohibitively expensive, with companies like Meta offering billion-dollar salaries to attract top researchers. Despite funding and ambition, Krutrim hadn’t managed to build the promised data centers, chips, or competitive models.
The most damning revelation was that according to reports, Aggarwal and Krutrim’s leadership were considering returning focus to Ola Electric, implicitly admitting that the grand AI venture was not viable at the promised scale. This wasn’t strategic diversification; this was the recognition that another venture had been oversold.
The IPO Crash: Public Reckoning and Market Reality
August 2024: The IPO and Initial Euphoria
Ola Electric went public in August 2024, listing at ₹91.18 against an issue price of ₹76, showing a first-day gain of 19.97%. The IPO was priced to value the company at ₹33,522 crore. Investors seemed to believe in the company’s growth potential and Aggarwal’s track record with Ola Cabs.
The Swift and Devastating Collapse
What followed was a stunning market reckoning. By November 2025, Ola Electric was trading at ₹42.13—a devastating 53.79% decline from the listing price in just over one year. The stock hit its 52-week high of ₹102.50 in September 2024 but has since plummeted, with a 52-week low of ₹39.60 in July 2025. The market’s verdict was clear: investors realized that the promises made during the IPO and in pre-launch marketing were not being met. The estimated CAGR is approximately -36.94% based on the issue price and current market price.
Stark Competitive Comparison
The contrast with Ola’s competitors was striking. Ather Energy, which went public in May 2025, has surged 132% in stock price, while Ola Electric has plummeted 53.79%. Ather achieved this through disciplined execution, quality focus, and consistent delivery on modest promises—the exact opposite of Ola Electric’s strategy. TVS has maintained market leadership with continuous product innovation, while Bajaj has successfully transitioned from traditional to electric with profitable EV operations.
Market Share Collapse: From Leader to Follower
The IPO period coincided with a massive loss of market dominance for Ola Electric. In 2024, Ola had commanded 35% of the electric two-wheeler market. By September 2025, this had shrunk to just 12.7%, placing it fourth in the market behind TVS (21.9%), Bajaj (18.7%), and Ather (17.2%). This was a catastrophic decline for a company that had once been the undisputed market leader.
The Lessons: A Blueprint for Failure That Entrepreneurs Must Avoid
Lesson 1: Don’t Chase Hype—Build Product First
The single greatest mistake Bhavish Aggarwal has made repeatedly is building hype before building product. For Ola Electric, the company took 100,000+ pre-orders before the product was ready for delivery. For Krutrim, the company claimed superiority over GPT-4 before the model was actually tested and validated at scale.
In both cases, launching with inflated promises created expectations beyond what the company could deliver. This created a toxic cycle where every subsequent communication was viewed through the lens of unfulfilled promises. Once that trust is broken, it’s nearly impossible to recover, as Ola Electric’s market share collapse demonstrates.
Actionable Insight: In today’s market, trust is your most valuable asset. Launch products when they’re ready, not when the market is excited. The early adopters who receive quality products become your best advocates; those who receive subpar products become your loudest critics and can destroy your brand on social media.
Lesson 2: The Pattern of Over-Promising and Under-Delivering
A clear pattern has emerged across all three of Aggarwal’s ventures:
| Venture | Promise | Reality | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ola Cabs | Transparent, affordable mobility | Achieved profitability after market stabilization | Managed through time and capital |
| Ola Electric | World-class manufacturing, premium quality at mass prices | Quality issues, delays, safety recalls, 53.79% stock decline | Massive |
| Krutrim | Superior AI models, India-first LLMs, custom silicon chips | Model quality below GPT, focus shifted to cloud services, continuous funding needs | Massive |
The consistent failure to deliver on promises is not due to external circumstances but to a fundamental misalignment between ambition and execution capability. Aggarwal seems to operate on the belief that if you promise something big enough and build it loud enough, it will somehow become real through sheer force of will and capital. This approach is fundamentally flawed for building sustainable businesses.
Lesson 3: Vanity Metrics Are Not Business Metrics
Ola Electric’s strategy was built on vanity metrics:
- “We have 100,000 pre-orders”
- “We have the largest EV factory in India”
- “We dominate market share with 35% of the market”
But these metrics ignored the critical underlying health indicators:
- Customer satisfaction and retention rates (actually abysmal)
- Net Promoter Score (negative for much of the period)
- Unit economics and path to profitability
- Repeat purchase rates and brand loyalty
Similarly, Krutrim focused on vanity metrics:
- “We’re the fastest unicorn”
- “Our AI is better than GPT-4”
- “We’re India’s first AI unicorn”
While ignoring actionable metrics that would have revealed problems:
- Actual user adoption and usage rates
- Real-world performance benchmarks against claimed capabilities
- Competitive positioning against open-source alternatives
- Revenue and business model viability
Why This Matters: Vanity metrics make you feel good in the short term but lead to poor strategic decisions. A company with high pre-orders but poor quality will eventually face a reckoning in the market. A company with impressive funding but no real business model will run out of money. The best companies obsess over actionable metrics: conversion rates, customer satisfaction, retention, lifetime value, and profitability timelines.
Lesson 4: Accept Failure and Ego Death
Bhavish Aggarwal’s greatest weakness is his inability to accept failure with grace and learn from mistakes. Rather than admitting mistakes with Ola Electric, he:
- Blamed external factors like the pandemic or supply chain issues
- Fired team members associated with the failures
- Continued to double down on over-promising
- Pursued new ventures before fixing the problems in existing ones
The Real Lesson: At any level of success, the ability to say “we failed” and learn from it is paramount. Aggarwal has never truly done this. Instead, he moves on to the next venture, bringing the same patterns with him. This is a recipe for long-term failure, even if individual ventures can achieve short-term wins through hype and capital influx.
The Competitive Landscape: Why Ola Is Losing
The Rise of Ather Energy: Execution Over Hype
Ather Energy represents everything Ola Electric is not: disciplined execution, quality focus, and customer-centric design. Ather’s stock has surged 132% since its IPO in May 2025, while Ola Electric has plummeted 53.79%. Ather’s approach includes:
- Relentless focus on build quality and durability
- Real innovation through the Ather 450X and the mass-market Ather Rizta
- Expanding charging infrastructure through the Ather Grid network
- Consistent delivery on product promises rather than aspirational claims
TVS and Bajaj: Legacy Players Strike Back
Traditional two-wheeler manufacturers like TVS and Bajaj have entered the EV space and captured significant market share through a simple formula: apply decades of manufacturing excellence to EV platforms. TVS now leads with 21.9% market share, while Bajaj commands 18.7%. These companies understand something that Aggarwal clearly doesn’t: manufacturing quality is not aspirational—it’s fundamental. You can’t promise quality and deliver mediocrity; customers will always prefer a boring, reliable scooter over a feature-rich, buggy one.
The Current State: August 2024 to November 2025
Ola Electric’s Mounting Crises
Since its IPO in August 2024, Ola Electric has faced mounting challenges:
- Stock Decline: 53.79% from listing to current price
- Market Share Loss: From 35% in 2024 to 12.7% in September 2025
- Mounting Losses: Net loss widened to ₹564 crore for Q3 FY2024-25, up from ₹376 crore the previous year
- Continued Layoffs: Over 500 additional employees laid off as profitability targets have not been met, with over 1,000 jobs cut by March 2025
- Leadership Controversy: In October 2025, Bhavish Aggarwal and a senior executive were named in an FIR on charges of abetment to suicide following the death of a 38-year-old engineer. The engineer’s family alleged workplace harassment, denial of salary, and mental torture
The suicide allegations, whether substantiated or not, reflect a broader perception of Ola Electric’s workplace culture as toxic and performance-driven without regard for employee welfare.
Krutrim’s Struggles and Implicit Admission of Failure
Krutrim has become the clearest manifestation of the “ego project” narrative. The company has:
- Burned through the initial $50 million funding with a monthly burn rate of $4-5 million
- Required Bhavish Aggarwal to personally invest ₹2,000 crore ($230 million) through debt pledged against his Ola Electric shares
- Reduced headcount from 250 to 150 without delivering on core AI promises
- Shifted focus from AI model development to cloud infrastructure for Ola companies
- Announced plans to return focus to Ola Electric, implicitly admitting that the AI venture is not viable at the promised scale
The Broader Implications: What This Means for Indian Entrepreneurship
The Danger of Personality Cults in Startup Culture
Bhavish Aggarwal’s journey illustrates a broader danger in the Indian startup ecosystem: the creation of personality cults around founders. When a founder is celebrated as “India’s Elon Musk,” every failure is rationalized, every over-promise is seen as visionary thinking, and every problem is blamed on external factors. This is toxic to healthy business development and creates misaligned incentives.
The truth is more mundane: Aggarwal is a capable entrepreneur who has had one major success (Ola Cabs) and two significant failures (Ola Electric and Krutrim). This doesn’t make him a visionary; this makes him a human being with limited capacity to execute across multiple complex domains simultaneously.
Separating Vision from Execution: The Critical Distinction
There’s a fundamental difference between having a grand vision and being able to execute it. The history of entrepreneurship is littered with visionaries who couldn’t execute and executors who couldn’t dream. The truly great founders combine both—they dream big but deliver consistently.
The lesson for other entrepreneurs: Ambition without execution is just noise. Build first, then announce. Deliver first, then promise. Prove your concept with reality before asking the market to believe in your hype.
The Role of Capital in Enabling Over-Promising
Bhavish Aggarwal was able to over-promise repeatedly because he had access to abundant capital. When Ola Electric failed to deliver on time, investors continued to fund the company. When Krutrim made outlandish claims, it was able to raise $50 million in funding based on those claims alone. In a capital-rich environment, founders can become unmoored from reality, believing that funding validates their vision rather than understanding that capital is merely a tool for execution.
This is a critical lesson for investors: The hype around a founder should be a red flag, not a green light. Do your due diligence. Examine track records carefully. Question over-promises. The founders who succeed are those who consistently under-promise and over-deliver, not the reverse.
YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKcBDuufogE
Conclusion: The Rise and Fall of the Indian Elon Musk
Bhavish Aggarwal’s story is a cautionary tale about the dangers of ego, over-promising, and the illusion that ambition alone can create success. He took over India’s ride-hailing market and successfully competed against Uber—a genuine achievement that should be recognized. But that success led to overconfidence. When he entered the EV market, he brought that same overconfidence with him, leading to catastrophic results. When he entered AI, he didn’t learn from those mistakes; he repeated them with even grander promises and worse execution.
The fundamental issues that define Aggarwal’s trajectory are:
- Lack of Humility: Unable to admit failure or learn from mistakes
- Misalignment of Vision and Execution: Promises consistently exceed capability
- Toxic Leadership Culture: Creates fear rather than innovation and has resulted in serious workplace allegations
- Focus on Hype Over Substance: Prioritizes what looks good over what actually works
- Ego Over Objectivity: Cannot accept criticism or adjust course based on market feedback
What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From This Case Study
For readers who are building companies or considering investment opportunities:
- Don’t chase hype: Build product first, talk later. Your reputation depends on delivery.
- Focus on actionable metrics: Vanity metrics are misleading. Track metrics that reveal the health of your business: retention, profitability, customer satisfaction.
- Accept failure gracefully: The ability to say “we failed” and adjust course is critical to long-term success.
- Build sustainable culture: A company is ultimately its people. Treat them well, and they’ll move mountains for you. Treat them poorly, and they’ll be your loudest critics.
- Execute first, promise later: Under-promise and over-deliver. This is the path to sustainable business and lasting reputation.
The Real Cost of the “Ego Project”
The real tragedy of Bhavish Aggarwal’s journey is that he could have been remembered as India’s great entrepreneur if he had stuck with Ola Cabs and made it a global powerhouse. Instead, he chased new shiny objects, over-promised on each, and in doing so, tarnished his legacy and wasted billions in investor capital. Ola Electric’s stock crash, Krutrim’s cash burn crisis, and the stream of negative headlines about workplace culture have transformed him from India’s “Elon Musk” to a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked ego and ambition without execution.
This is the real lesson of the “ego project”: Great companies are built on consistency, quality, and humble continuous improvement—not on grand promises and hype.
Key Takeaways for Your Business
- Ola Cabs: A genuine success story that captured India’s mobility market through disciplined execution
- Ola Electric: Over-promised on quality and delivery; market share collapsed from 35% to 12.7% within one year
- Krutrim AI: A cash-burning venture with inflated claims about AI superiority that required ₹2,000 crore in personal funding
- The Pattern: Consistent over-promising, followed by under-delivery, followed by large layoffs and leadership turmoil
- Stock Performance: Ola Electric IPO down 53.79% from listing price in just 15 months
- Market Reality: Competitors like Ather, TVS, and Bajaj are winning through consistent execution and quality focus
- Leadership Issues: Toxic culture and abrasive management style have become hallmarks of Aggarwal’s ventures
- Lessons for Entrepreneurs: Build before you talk, focus on actionable metrics, accept failure, and prioritize culture
The “Ego Project” of Bhavish Aggarwal is ultimately a story about what happens when ambition outpaces execution, when hype replaces substance, and when ego prevents learning from failure. It’s a lesson every entrepreneur, investor, and business student should study carefully as they navigate the complex world of building scalable companies in competitive markets.
YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKcBDuufogE
