Bengaluru: After cab aggregation and electric scooters, Ola is entering the hotly contested quick commerce space, the company’s founder Bhavish Aggarwal said on Thursday.
At an event on Independence Day announcing the launch of new EV scooters and other initiatives, Aggarwal made a slew of announcements including renaming of Ola Cabs to Ola consumers. Ola food and grocery on Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) surpassed 40,000 orders per day in Bengaluru in a pilot concluded in 2024, he said, adding that Ola Consumer is set to introduce more consumer products on ONDC soon.
He also said that the Ola Group's artificial intelligence (AI) arm (Ola Krutrim) will design and manufacture a set of chips called Bodhi for AI, Sarv for General Compute, and Ojas for Edge by the end of financial year (FY) 2026.
"India being the source for 20% of the world’s data and home to one of the largest tech talent pool, is fully equipped to lead the AI wave", Aggarwal said. He also announced that the company will design and produce an AI silicon chip by FY26 that is custom-built for complex workloads. Ola has partnered with global majors such as Arm and Untether AI for the development of CPU and AI chips. It announced plans to launch Bodhi 2 , another AI chip by FY28.
“To further support this growing ecosystem, Ola Consumer will offer one year of free Krutrim Cloud for all ONDC suppliers, applicable for startups and SMEs, under a fair usage policy. In addition, D2C brands will also be given one year of free access to Krutrim Cloud", Aggarwal added.
The shift to fast commerce is likely to create 2.5 lakh additional jobs, the company said.
Aggarwal also announced Ola Credit, in partnership with Tata Capital and InCred. The feature will ensure personal loans at the click of a button, supported by a 100% digitised process, and credit in the bank account within minutes.
With the plan to have fully automated dark stores and state-of-the-art fulfillment centers, the company has partnered with several large consumer retail brands including ITC, Marico and Bombay Shaving Company for efficient and automated warehousing operations, elevating logistics to reduce manual wastage and high costs of storage.
He said that these automated dark stores can placed in any real estate with an electric supply, which will use robots to run the assembly operations.
On the scooter side of things, Ola plans to deploy 1 lakh EVs throughout the next two years. Furthermore, the company has launched an electric motorcycle portfolio - Roaster X, Roadster, and Roadster Pro with prices starting from Rs 74,999 to nearly Rs 2 lakh respectively. Its indigenously developed Bharat 4680 Cell and battery packs will be integrated in its own vehicles by end the current fiscal.