Ola Cabs(stylised as OLΛ) is an Indian ridesharing company offering services that include peer-to-peer ridesharing, ride service hailing, taxi and food delivery. Olacabs was started by two IIT Bombay graduates Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati.
Bhavish Aggarwal had been very interested in entrepreneurship from his college days and aimed to start his own company at some stage. While in Microsoft, he began actively searching for ideas to start a business. He left Microsoft and started an online company to sell short duration tours and holidays online. While running that business for a couple of months, he took a car rental from Bangalore to Bandipur and had a very bad experience. The driver stopped the car enroute, tried to renegotiate and abandoned them in the middle of the journey. That made him realize that it was an issue many consumers faced and providing a top class rental experience was a great opportunity. He changed his business to focus on that new opportunity and started Olacabs in December 2010 along with Ankit Bhati, a fellow alumnus from IIT-B.
Their business model is very simple. They partner with private taxi owners, provide modern technology and processes for booking, dispatch etc. and quality assurance. Their model requires very low capital investment as they don’t buy cars. Private taxi owners also benefit by being able to access aggregated consumer demand across different services like outstation travel, local transfers and full day/half day rentals.
