Ola Electric controls its IP, says company in response to reports of brand transfer
According to news reports, Ola Electric founder Bhavish Aggarwal was considering transferring IP rights to a company controlled by his family office.
Ola Electric says it holds intellectual property rights, including the logo and work-mark of ‘Ola’, amid news reports suggesting that founder Bhavish Aggarwal was considering transferring the IP rights to a company controlled by his family office.
In a statement issued to the public bourses, Ola Electric said it holds a “perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-assignable, and revocable licence to use certain licensed intellectual property, including the logo and/or word-mark of Ola." The licence has been granted exclusively to the company’s electric vehicle business, it said.
A report in The Economic Times on Monday said that Aggarwal is planning to make a transfer of IP rights as part of a wider restructuring of his group companies.
The Ola brand is currently housed under ANI Technologies. ANI also operates the ride-hailing business and holds its brand IP, according to the report.
Ola Electric was created out of ANI Technologies in 2017 and set up as a separate entity.
The re-organisation had reportedly elicited pushback from a group of shareholders of ANI who would miss out on royalty income from the brand licence, sources told The Econoimc Times.
Shareholders at ANI include Vanguard, DST Global and Warburg Pincus. These parties do not have stakes in Ola Electric and Krutrim AI.
Most recently, Ola Maps was transferred from ANI to Krutrim AI, with the asset valued at Rs 40 crore, people told The Econoimc Times.
The restructuring coincides with Aggarwal entering new business arenas that would need heavy investments, the report said. For instance, Krutrim is gearing up to enter segments such as large language models (LLMs) and AI chips, which are expected to be rolled out by 2026.
In February, Aggarwal had announced a Rs 2,000-crore investment in the AI venture by pledging 2.4% of his stake in Ola Electric to help finance the funding.
(Disclaimer: Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory, is an independent director in Ola Electric)
Edited by Swetha Kannan