Ankit Bhati
Co-founder, Ola
Dual Degree (B.Tech + M.Tech) in Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (2011)
About
Ankit Bhati is a co-founder of Ola, the Bengaluru ride-hailing company, and served as its chief technology officer from the start, heading technology and backend operations. He studied at IIT Bombay, completing a dual B.Tech and M.Tech degree in mechanical engineering in 2011, and worked as a freelance developer before joining Bhavish Aggarwal on Ola's founding team. Ola Cabs launched in January 2011 as a taxi aggregator that took bookings over the phone, released its mobile app in June 2012 and bought rival TaxiForSure in 2015. Bhati was named Entrepreneur of the Year 2017 at The Economic Times awards and Disruptor of the Year 2017 by CNBC-TV18, and featured on a Forbes 30 Under 30 list. In October 2019 Moneycontrol reported that he had stepped back from day-to-day work at Ola; the company denied this at the time. By early 2022 reports described him as having taken a back seat a couple of years earlier while remaining a shareholder, and he was setting up a SaaS company, Amnic, with former Ola executives Satya Nagarajan and Nimish Joshi.
Timeline from the fetched sources: 2011, completes his IIT Bombay dual degree and Ola Cabs launches with Bhavish Aggarwal; 2017, ET Entrepreneur of the Year and CNBC-TV18 Disruptor of the Year; October 2019, reports of a move away from his operational role, which Ola publicly rejected, calling him 'core to Ola and its journey'; early 2022, launch of Amnic, which was described at the time as working in the DevOps toolchain space and registered with the Registrar of Companies in Bengaluru. Satya Nagarajan had been Ola's head of software engineering and AI, and Nimish Joshi its head of strategy and business development.
Source: acr.iitbombay.org