Ola (ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd.)

Ola began in 2010 as a Bangalore taxi-booking service and evolved into India's most ambitious mobility organism - a case study in niche construction followed by adaptive radiation. Founded by Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati, the company did not merely enter the Indian ride-hailing market; it constructed the niche itself. In a country where informal taxi networks, auto-rickshaws, and fragmented transport systems dominated, Ola built the digital infrastructure that made on-demand mobility legible to both drivers and riders. This is niche construction in the biological sense: the organism reshapes its environment to favor its own survival.

The adaptive radiation that followed mirrors what biologists observe after a species colonizes a new ecological opportunity. From its core ride-hailing platform, Ola branched into auto-rickshaw bookings, intercity travel, fleet management, financial services through Ola Money, and food delivery. Each new service exploited the same underlying network of drivers and riders, the way Darwin's finches radiated into different feeding niches from a common ancestor. Not every radiation succeeded - Ola Foods shut down - but the pattern of rapid diversification from a platform base is textbook adaptive radiation.

Ola Electric represents the most consequential branch of this radiation. Aggarwal bet that India's transition to electric vehicles creates an ecological opportunity comparable to the original ride-hailing disruption. Ola Electric's Futurefactory in Tamil Nadu produces electric scooters at scale, with ambitions to expand into electric cars and battery manufacturing. The strategic logic is niche construction compounded: having built the digital mobility layer, Ola now attempts to build the physical vehicle layer beneath it. Whether this vertical integration succeeds or overextends the organism beyond its adaptive capacity remains the central question of Ola's next decade.