Exclusive: Ola may lose two more senior executives

Just a few months after Ola saw the exit of many of its top executives, two more may be out the door soon. Naroo Krishnan, head of products at Ola Mobility and Sanjay Kharb, vice president for engineering at Ola, are in the process of exiting the company, according to two people familiar with the matter. 

If both Krishnan and Kharb leave, Ola will not have any more senior executives remaining in the technology and product verticals. 

“I hear that it is getting more and more difficult to work at Ola,” said one of the persons cited above, requesting anonymity. “This is why there’s an attrition at the company. Almost no senior executives or VPs remaining.”

It is also unclear as to what the status of Ola’s other co-founder Ankit Bhati is who was reportedly moving away from the company’s day-to-day operations, added the same person. 

The ride-hailing company, which is tightly controlled by its chief executive Bhavish Aggarwal, has seen a large number of senior executives leave over the past several months.

In September, Ola saw the exit of Srivatsan Sridhar who used to head the firm’s cab business and left the company. According to his LinkedIn profile, Sridhar is currently working as the vice president of fintech startup Rupeek. And a month later, Gaurav Aggarwal who was head of data science at Ola. He currently works at Google as a research scientist, his LinkedIn profile shows.  

At the same time, Ola’s head of engineering Pranav Tiwari and head of finance at Ola Electric Mobility Sarmad Nazki had resigned, according to a media report. Meanwhile, Ola had at least six senior executives resign from its international offices in the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

Just a few months prior to that in June, Ola saw the exit of its corporate development head Nimish Joshi who now works at Star TV Network, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

Ola did not respond to queries sent by Entrackr at the time of publishing this story. We will update once they respond. 

Krishnan had joined Ola in January 2018 from Oath to head products for the Bengaluru-headquartered firm. He has worked with Yahoo in the past in Sunnyvale, California. Kharb has been with Ola for over three years since January 2017. He was with InMobi and Makemytrip before joining the company.

Ola has been continuously losing senior executives for over a year now. During late-2018, Saikiran Krishnamurthy and Joy Bandekar had left the firm. 

The cab-hailing firm has also been on a cost-cutting spree recently as a result of pressure from its biggest investor — SoftBank. Entrackr reported in December that Ola had already given pink slips to 500 employees and was looking to layoff 500 more in the coming months.