'Nobody wants to run an exploitation factory.'
Hero MotoCorp and TVS Motor crossed Rs 1,000 crore in R&D spend for the first time, as legacy OEMs accelerate innovation to compete with new-age EV players.
Retail sales of electric passenger vehicles (ePVs) nearly doubled in July 2025, surging 93 per cent year-on-year (Y-o-Y) to 15,528 units, even as overall passenger vehicle (PV) retail volumes declined marginally. In contrast, electric two-wheeler (e2W) sales dropped by 4.3 per cent to 102,973 units, according to the Federation of Automobile Dealers Associations (Fada) data.
India's 25 venture capital and private equity backed "new-age" companies, that listed between May 2020 and June 2025, reveals a sobering reality behind the hype: barely a third have delivered sustained outperformance against the market.
Ola Electric will miss its target to fully utilise installed production capacity in next six to eight months and will achieve only 50 per cent of it by November 2023, founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal said on Friday. At the time of launch of the new S1 Air electric scooter ahead of Diwali last month, he had said the company was already producing more than 1,000 a day at its 'future factory' and would be scaling it up significantly beyond that.
Among Sensex firms, Bharat Electronics, Eternal, Mahindra & Mahindra, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Tata Motors and Power Grid were the gainers. However, Adani Ports, ITC, UltraTech Cement and Titan were among the laggards.
With regard to his investment in Ola, Bansal said that on the one hand, the ride-hailing major had emerged as a global force in the mobility space and on the other it continued to build deeper for various needs of a billion Indians through its platform. This is the largest funding by an individual in the app cab.
SoftBank Group-backed Ola Electric is in talks with multiple global suppliers to build a battery cell manufacturing plant in India with a capacity of up to 50-gigawatt hours, sources said. As part of its broader electrification push, the firm plans to invest in companies with advanced cell and battery technology, alongside the 50 Gwh battery plant. Ola Electric needs 40 Gwh of battery capacity to power 10 million electric scooters annually. The remainder will be for its electric cars, which the company plans to manufacture in the future.
Ola Electric, India's largest maker of electric scooters, launched its most affordable ride on Tuesday, in an attempt to woo more customers and expand its electric two-wheeler lineup.
Bike-taxi drivers are also left stranded as many depended on the service.
SoftBank-backed mobility firm Ola, announced expansion of its employee stock options (ESOP) pool to Rs 3000 crore. Ola is also allocating an additional Rs 400 crore worth of stocks to employees in the run up to its IPO. The allocation rewards Ola's high impact employees and will lead to long term wealth creation for them.
Tencent reinforces India's consumer internet story. Ranju Sarkar reports.
Ola Electric on Wednesday said it has commenced deliveries of its S1 scooters. The company said it organised special events in Bangalore and Chennai on Wednesday to deliver both S1 and S1 Pro trims to the first 100 customers. "Today is a landmark day for those who have joined the revolution with us as we begin our deliveries of Ola S1. "We are working hard to ramp up the production at the Ola Future factory to get the scooters in the hands of our customers as per their delivery windows," Ola Electric chief marketing officer Varun Dubey said in a statement.
As a tech services company, Ola has never been in hardcore manufacturing. And unlike in ride hailing, which is a two-player market (Uber is the only other competitor), in two-wheelers it faces many entrenched players. But most of all, rivals say Ola's targets are out of sync with most, even ambitious, projections.
IPO-bound mobility platform Ola, said it has successfully raised $500 million via a Term Loan B (TLB) from marquee international institutional investors. This term loan has no impact on the valuation of Bhavish Aggarwal-led Ola. The Bengaluru-based firm recently raised $139 million. This is part of a $1 billion funding round for which the company is in talks with investors, increasing its valuation to about $7.5 billion, according to the sources.
The government on Wednesday asked e-commerce platforms to conduct annual internal audits to make sure that they are not resorting to manipulative tactics to mislead consumers and prevent them from making right choices -- a technique commonly referred to as dark pattern -- and submit reports to the Department of Consumer Affairs (DoCA). It comes just a week after Uber was issued a notice by the Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) over its "advance tip" feature.
Rising inflation and stagnant wages are forcing a number of salaried professionals to venture into the bike taxi service as part-time riders.
Ola founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Bhavish Aggarwal will step back from day-to-day operations to focus more on engineering functions, team building, and products, apart from focusing on long-term strategic projects, such as two-wheelers, cars, and innovations in quick commerce and international expansion. "I'll be spending more time with all engineering functions, team building, and on products," said Aggarwal in an internal note, adding, "I'll also be increasing my focus on our longer-term strategic projects, including new two-wheeler products, our car project, innovations in quick commerce, electrifying ride-hailing, our cell research and development (R&D), international expansion, building our Pune technology (tech) centre, and Futurefoundry UK." To drive scale, speed, and quality, Aggarwal said he is expanding Ola Group's chief financial officer (CFO) G R Arun Kumar's role to help him steer 'day-to-day operations' across the group.
Ola Electric is moving the delivery for the first batch of its electric scooters to between December 15 to the end of the month, a two- to four-week delay from its earlier schedule, due to a shortage of chipsets and electronic parts. The first batch of deliveries were scheduled for November 30 but the company decided to delay them after a meeting between its factory team and the global supply chain on Saturday. It became clear that the late delivery of chips and electronic parts was only 'getting worse', sources told Business Standard. Ola has apologised to customers for the delay and said it is "ramping up production as fast as we can so that you can get your Ola S1 at the earliest". It has stopped taking any new bookings until the chip shortage has eased, say sources.
Moody's Investors Service on Monday said it has assigned a first-time B3 corporate family rating (CFR) to ANI Technologies, which operates ride hailing service Ola. Moody's CFRs are opinions of a corporate family's ability to honour all of its financial obligations. It has also assigned a B3 rating to the company's proposed senior secured term loan.
In many states, aggregators operate without a licence; in others, with the risk of the licence being revoked by any regional transport office on the slightest pretext.
Upon completion, the factory will create almost 10,000 jobs and will initially have an annual capacity of 2 million units.
The two-wheeler giant had only 14 per cent of the electric two-wheeler market in May this year, but its 26.8 per cent in December
Ola Electric on Thursday said it will bring its electric scooter to the Indian market in July this year, and is working on setting up a 'Hypercharger Network' to include one lakh charging points across 400 cities. Last year, Ola had announced a Rs 2,400 crore investment for setting up its first electric scooter factory in Tamil Nadu. Upon completion, the factory will create nearly 10,000 jobs and will be the world's largest scooter manufacturing facility that will initially have an annual capacity of 2 million units.
'Today, we have 2 million active drivers earning through our platform every month.'
Players like Ola Electric, Ather Energy, Kinetic Green and BGauss are introducing premium services and infrastructure enhancements.
In the hottest sector of AI, where most global VC funding is going currently, the country's record has not been anything to write home about.
It takes a while to get used to the constant and instant supply of power that is the case with EVs, and handling the S1 Pro when it takes a corner or makes a turn can be tricky, says Pavan Lall.
Ola was supposed to expand to the Netherlands, Kenya, Dubai, Israel, and Brazil.
CCPA said the primary issues raised in the notices included 'deficiency in service'. This includes lack of proper response from customer support, driver refusing to take payment by online mode and insisting for cash only.
Ride-hailing major Ola on Wednesday said it will launch its electric two-wheeler range in New Zealand. This will help support the New Zealand government's goal of bringing on road 64,000 new electric vehicles by the end of 2021, while also helping the public sector become carbon neutral by 2025, Ola said in a statement. According to the industry sources, the company plans to launch the range in New Zealand over the next 6-9 months.
While mobility aggregators such as Rapido and Uber have welcomed the decision, gig workers associations and unions remain concerned.
More than 30 technology startups, collectively valued at $100 billion, are poised to go public by 2027, signalling a potential rebound in India's stock market activity, according to a report by investment bank The Rainmaker Group. Walmart-owned Flipkart, financial technology (fintech) leader PhonePe, SoftBank-backed Lenskart, Razorpay, Zetwerk, and Meesho are among the top companies preparing to go public in India.
Ola has raised $400 million from investors led by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner's DST Global.
'Ola in India makes money on every ride. Our focus over the past couple of years has been to keep growing the market and our share in the market and build up on sustainable business,' says co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal.
Rediff.com's Syed Firdaus Ashraf and Hitesh Harisinghani speak to millennials to find out if the ease of ride-sharing apps like Ola and Uber was a reason for them not buying a car.
Ola Electric on Monday said it will foray into the electric car segment with plans to launch its first model by 2024. The company, which struggled with deliveries for its electric scooters after it announced entry into the segment exactly a year ago, has set an ambitious target of selling 10 lakh electric cars by 2026-2027. In a press conference, Ola founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal said Ola Electric aims to provide a range of electric two-wheelers to electric cars which are priced in the range of Rs 1 lakh to Rs 50 lakh.
Ola's factory will create 10,000 jobs and serve as the company's global manufacturing hub for India and international markets.
Ola commits to invest $100 mn in Vogo, to bring scooter-sharing to its app, reports Alnoor Peermohamed.
Mobility company Ola's chief financial officer Swayam Saurabh and chief operating officer Gaurav Porwal are leaving the company. These developments come at a time when the SoftBank-backed company's core ride-hailing unit is planning to go public and for which it raised $500 million from Warburg Pincus and Temasek in July this year. These investment firms had partnered with the company founder Bhavish Aggarwal for this round.
