After founding 3 unicorn startups, and taking one of them public, Bhavish Aggarwal’s net worth is zooming to stratospheric levels.
Bhavish Aggarwal is personally worth $2.7 billion (Rs. 22,500 crore) after Ola Electric’s IPO, Bloomberg reports. Ola Electric went public on Friday, and after a tepid open, its shares were locked in a 20 percent upper circuit. Aggarwal had sold Ola Electric shares worth Rs. 288 crore in the IPO, and at its closing price, his remaining near-35-percent stake in Ola Electric is worth Rs. 11,816 crore.
A net worth of $2.7 billion puts Bhavish Aggarwal in rarified territory. At the age of 38, he’s one of only 7 people in world’s top 500 billionaires who are under the age of 40. Also, a $2.7 billion net worth makes him one of the richest startup founders in India.
The journey to eye-popping wealth hasn’t come easy for Aggarwal. He’d founded Ola in 2010, and staved off a herculean challenge from Uber to settle in a duopoly in India’s cab hailing market. Ola thrived, and had a peak valuation of $7.3 billion. In 2017, he founded Ola Electric, which in its early days was beset with delivery delays and incidents of its vehicles catching fire. Ola Electric, though, persevered, and now commands a public valuation of $5 billion. And earlier this year, he’d announced AI startup Krutrim, which had attained a valuation of $1 billion within two months of its founding. Apart from his three companies, Aggarwal is also an angel investor in companies like Chaayos and OfBusiness, and these investments have also added to his net worth.
At this point, there are whispered comparisons with him and Elon Musk. Both billionaires run multiple companies, one of which is public, while others remain private. Both are outspoken on X, and have built substantial fan-followings on social media. Both are interested in futuristic sectors such as EV and AI, and both seem to hold right-of-center views, with Musk officially endorsing Donald Trump for President, and Aggarwal often praising the policies of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It remains to be seen if Aggarwal can walk in Musk’s footsteps, but there’s little doubting that he certainly has the ambition — and pluck — to become one of the most consequential entrepreneurs India’s ever produced.