Ola advances plan for IPO as electric scooters take off in India
Ola Electric Mobility Pvt. is in line for an initial public offering sooner than its founder previously imagined, reflecting the Indian startup’s whirlwind pace of growth since it started selling electric scooters in late 2021.
“I thought it would take me four to six years of revenue to go public,” Founder and Chief Executive Officer Bhavish Aggarwal said in an interview while sipping iced Vietnamese coffee in New Delhi’s bustling Connaught Place. “Now I can feel that it will be much earlier.
Ola Electric has grown and matured faster than I had initially planned because the market response has been very strong.” The company, whose backers include SoftBank Group Corp. and Tiger Global Management, has become leader in India’s electric-scooter market with a 38% share.
It has sold more than 239,000 electric scooters since December 2021, according to data from the Society of Manufacturers of Electric Vehicles. While demand initially came from first-time scooter buyers, most of Ola Electric’s customers now are already fully-fledged converts, said 37-year-old Aggarwal, dressed in a black Nehru jacket, popularized by India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and later, The Beatles.Branching outAggarwal has ambitions to expand, with plans to unveil a motorbike by the end of this year and a battery-powered car in 2024, though the timelines may change.
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