Shortly after Ola Cars CEO exit, Ola Electric’s Chief Marketing Officer Varun Dubey has also exited the company.
According to an Ola spokesperson, Dubey has left the company due to personal reasons. This is the most recent exit among the multiple senior executives who have exited Ola in the past few months. However, the spokesperson said that Dubey’s exit is not related to Ola Cars CEO Arun Sirdeshmukh’s exit.
The company has attributed Sirdeshmukh’s exit to the fact that Arun Kumar GR has taken over his role of overseeing go-to-market function and Ola Cars. Arun Kumar GR is the Group CFO Ola, and CFO Ola Electric, G R Arun Kumar has recently been assigned the role to “drive the day-to-day operations of Ola group” as Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal increased focus on engineering functions, team building and product.
Ola Electric’s Chief Technology Officer, Dinesh Radhakrishnan has also been reported to have quit the company in the past few days. These exits come at a time when Ola has been battling multiple customer complaints around Ola electric scooters. The company has also announced a recall of 1,441 vehicles on April 24, after one of its scooters caught fire in Pune.
The mobility company’s used cars retail business, Ola Cars is also struggling to scale with its operations being shut down in five cities. These include Nagpur, Visakhapatnam, Ludhiana, Patna and Guwahati, according to two sources close to the development. Last year as well, Ola’s HR chief Rohit Munjal, Chief Financial Officer Swayam Saurabh and Chief Operating Officer Gaurav Porwal have also left the company.
With plans to become a super app for Indians, Ola has launched various verticals including insurance, credit cards, grocery delivery, cloud kitchens, pre-owned cars retail, cab-hailing, and bill payments among others.