Ankush Aggarwal

2023 Young Alumni Achievement Award

Ankush Aggarwal, a start-up enthusiast, is the Chief Business Officer at Ola. He graduated with his B.S. in Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2016. He is actively involved in Ola’s businesses and leads multiple functions across ride hailing, Ola Electric and Ola Financial Services. He is responsible for Ola Electric’s rapidly growing D2C sales and service network across the country. In his role, he spearheads the Go To Market (GTM) Strategy including and not limited to sales, fulfillment, vehicle deliveries and overall retail infrastructure. Ola Electric has grown to be India’s largest EV company by revenue and  has sold ~200,000 2W’s in a period spanning just over a year. Ankush also heads Ola Electric’s International business as the company plans to expand its presence in international markets including LATAM, ASEAN and EU regions. He also leads Ola Financial Services (OFS) wherein he is working towards expanding the company’s portfolio in financial services including insurance, lending and online payments.

Before taking up this role, Ankush founded Avail Finance (Goddard Technical Solutions Private Limited) in 2017 and was successful in raising funding of $30 million. Avail Finance is India’s first neo bank that provides financial services to the blue collar workforce and has over 6 million users. He founded Avail Finance with the belief to provide financial inclusion to India’s urban population by prospects of using technology as a means to achieve that end.

Through his illustrious industry experience, Ankush’s excellence lies in the intersection of multiple functions, including technologies, business, revenue, and data. His tryst with Ola dates to 2012 when he joined ANI Technologies (ride hailing business) as a Software Developer in Bangalore. He was part of a four-member programming team that created an android application to enable customers to book a cab from their mobile phone. He also played a key role in developing a feature that enabled the users to request a cab for a future time and implemented a referral system that rewards customers when they refer the application to their friends.

As the company grew and started expanding its frontiers, Ankush had an opportunity to spearhead the launch of Ola Auto by integrating auto-rickshaws onto the Ola app. He was also the architect of Ola’s driver incentive scheme that increased the booking acceptance percentage from 45% to 60% and grew the annualized run rate from 0 to $2.5 million in one month.