Ola Electric’s Rapid Growth Sparks Early IPO Plans

Indian startup Ola Electric Mobility is reportedly in line for an initial public offering (IPO) sooner than anticipated.

This change is due to its success in India’s electric scooter market, Bloomberg reported Monday (July 17). With 38% share of that market, Ola Electric has sold more than 239,000 electric scooters since it began selling the vehicles in December 2021.

Ola Electric Mobility CEO and Founder Bhavish Aggarwal said in the report: “I thought it would take me four to six years of revenue to go public. 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.”

Aggarwal did not specify a date for a potential IPO, the report said.

The success of its electric scooter is just the start, according to the report. Backers of Ola Electric include SoftBank Group Corp. and Tiger Global Management, and Aggarwal has further ambitions to expand.

Plans to unveil a motorbike by the end of 2023 and a battery-powered car by 2024 are in the pipeline, though the timeline could feasibly shift, the report said.

Ola Electric Mobility is also considering exporting its electric scooters to Southeast Asia, Latin America and Europe, per the report. The company had thought about doing so earlier but encountered unexpectedly high demand for the vehicles in India.

Ola has expanded in other sectors as well, with its ride-hailing platform announcing in March 2022 that it was acquiring Avail Finance, a neobank that was founded by the brother of Ola’s co-founder.

The company said at the time that the deal would help Ola Financial Services, a subsidiary of Ola, bolster its lending services and gain a foothold offering financial services to India’s underserved blue collar workers.

In another recent move in the micromobility space, United Kingdom-based micromobility firm HumanForest raised $15 million in April to boost its eBike technology, double the size of its fleet and develop its advertising platform and user app.

Two months earlier, in February, micromobility startup Dance raised $12.8 million to expand its eBike offerings in Europe. The company said it would use the funding to grow in the five cities in which it operates: Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Vienna.