Ola hires former BMW Group executive Anand Shah to lead new EV arm

Taxi aggregator Ola has hired former BMW Group executive Anand Shah as its head of Strategic Initiatives. He will be leading the electric vehicle (EV) programme and potential experiments in assisted and autonomous driving at the company.  

As senior vice-president, Shah will be a key member of Ola’s leadership team. At BMW, he set up a skunkworks department, developing an autonomous vehicle strategy, evaluating mobility services, and assessing new opportunities. His core competence was looking at opportunities beyond BMW’s core business. An Ola spokesperson confirmed the appointment; Shah, too, updated his LinkedIn profile with “leading strategic new ventures for Ola”, but did not divulge any details. 

Ola is trying to zoom ahead of rival Uber in EVs, having already rolled out a pilot in Nagpur in partnership with Mahindra Electric.

Apart from his work around autonomous mobility, Shah has experience in creating teams that focus on projects that, according to his LinkedIn profile, “disrupt the business from the inside before being disrupted by the outside”. Ola’s largest investor, SoftBank, has been pushing it to make bigger bets in the future of mobility. Masayoshi Son, chief executive officer, SoftBank, has said he is bullish on the future of EVs and will gift India a million of these through Ola. In January, Ola hired Chinam Netaji Patro, a former executive of Bajaj Auto, as senior director of its EV division. Shah has also worked as a lobbyist with Albright Stonebridge Group. He led the India and Southasia practice for it, advising companies trying to enter the transportation and mobility industries in these markets. 

He is also the founder and CEO of Sarvajal, an organisation that came up with the concept of drinking water dispensing machines in villages, and Indicorps, a non-profit that offers fellowships to people of Indian origin to implement sustainable development projects with grassroots organisations. Indicorps was awarded the Gujarat Garima Award in 2003 by the then chief minister Narendra Modi. He was also one of the key persons behind the “execution, positioning, and optics” of PMr Modi’s event at Madison Square Garden in New York in September 2014.