SoftBank-backed Ola boosts leadership team, hires top brass across segments

Mobility platform Ola has announced key leadership appointments across Ola Financial Services, Ola Cars, and Ola Electric. The appointments are a continuation of Ola’s drive to attract the best global talent to realise its vision of New Mobility which encompasses New Mobility Services.

P V Harinarayan has joined as the VP Lending, Ola Financial Services. Harinarayan brings close to two decades of experience in the banking and fintech domain, having previously been the CEO of Simple Pay, where he was responsible for building a High tech purpose led digital lending NBFC. He has previously worked with organisations such as Bajaj Finserv, Barclays and ICICI Bank.

V Ramesh has joined as the VP and Head of Operations at the Ola Futurefactory and will be responsible for efficient operations and instilling best practices in safety, quality and productivity that will help scale up the Futurefactory into the world’s largest and most advanced two-wheeler factory built on Industry 4.0 principles. Ramesh brings with him over three decades of experience in the areas of production, quality, design & development, having previously worked at Toyota, Maruti Suzuki, Lucas TVS and TATA Hitachi.

Priteesh Mahajan has joined as the Head of Two-wheeler Product Planning and Program Management at Ola Electric and will be responsible for overseeing the engineering program management for the company’s two-wheeler programme which includes both the current line-up, as well as future products. With a rich experience of over two decades, Priteesh has joined us from ABB where he managed global and local businesses as the Head of the Global Instrumentation business.

“We’re ushering in the era of New Mobility and continue to attract the best talent from around the world to build it out at scale,” said Bhavish Aggarwal, Founder and CEO, Ola. “These additions to our leadership team add significant experience and diverse skills to Ola in key areas including lending, production & quality as well as engineering management and I look forward to collaborating with them to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable mobility.”

These senior appointments come close on the heels of other recent high-profile leadership announcements over the last several months, which includes Arun Sirdeshmukh, CEO, Ola Cars, Vinay Bhopatkar as Head of Delivery business. In the last several months, Ola has made significant expansion of its leadership teams, which includes G. R. Arun Kumar as Group CFO, N Balachandar as CHRO, Rakesh Bhardwaj as Group CIO, Wayne Burgess as Ola Electric’s Head of Design, Jose Pinheiro, Head of Global Manufacturing & Operations, Ola Electric and Y. S. Kim as Ola Electric’s Global Head of Sales and Distribution and Julien Geffard who heads Ola Electric’s European operations.

SoftBank-backed Ola has also accelerated hiring across all levels to build a deep bench strength of talent and leadership pipeline in roles across the organisation. It is strengthening the company’s capabilities in AI, big data and analytics, app development and IoT, digital and software technologies that have been built on the back of its existing businesses.

In October this year, Ola’s chief financial officer Swayam Saurabh and chief operating officer Gaurav Porwal decided to move on from the company. The company’s core ride-hailing unit was planning to go public and for which it raised $500 million from Warburg Pincus and Temasek in July this year. These investment firms had partnered with the company founder Bhavish Aggarwal for this round.

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