Bhavish Aggarwal Vs LinkedIn: Ola To Stop Using Microsoft Azure, Migrate To Krutrim AI Cloud

Bhavish Aggarwal, the founder of unicorn startups Ola Cabs, Ola Electric, and Krutrim AI,  on Saturday (May 11) said that Ola would stop using Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure and migrate to Krutrim’s cloud.

The announcement came amid Aggarwal’s ongoing tussle with professional networking platform LinkedIn over the removal of a post made by the former on the platform.

“Since LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and Ola is a big customer of Azure, we’ve decided to move our entire workload out of Azure to our own Krutrim cloud within the next week. It is a challenge as all developers know, but my team is so charged up about doing this,” Aggarwal said in a post on X.

He also said that Krutrim will offer free cloud usage for a year to any developer who wants to leave Azure. 

It is pertinent to note that tech giant Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016.

Battle Over Pronouns

At the heart of the issue is an answer given by LinkedIn’s AI chatbot to a question. When the Ola CEO asked the chatbot “Who is Bhavish Aggarwal?”, it responded by using the pronoun “they” for him. This irked Aggarwal.

In a LinkedIn post, Aggarwal framed the chatbot’s answer as a “pronoun illness” and expressed concerns about Indians copying this practice.

However, shortly afterwards, he said that the platform took down his post saying it went against its “Professional Community Guidelines”.

On Friday, Aggarwal again took to social media and alleged that LinkedIn again deleted his post and didn’t even notify him. He added that he would announce his next steps on the issue on Saturday.

DPI For Social Media

In his post today, Aggarwal said that the pronouns issue is a “woke political ideology of entitlement which doesn’t belong in India”.

“…Linkedin has presumed Indians need to have pronouns in our life, and that we can’t criticise it. They will bully us into agreeing with them or cancel us out. And if they can do this to me, I’m sure the average user stands no chance. As a founder and CEO, this western DEI system has a major impact on my business as it grows an entitlement mindset in our professional lives and I will fight it,” the serial entrepreneur’s post read.

Aggarwal said he would work with the Indian developer community to build a digital public infrastructure (DPI) for social media. He said the idea behind this is that the DPI would follow only Indian law, and the data would be owned by the creators instead of “corporates”.

This is in line with what the Ola cofounder said earlier this week. In a post on X, he highlighted the success of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) and questioned the need for social media to remain a walled garden.

Meanwhile, Aggarwal’s announcement about Ola moving to Krutrim’s cloud comes just a week after the generative AI unicorn announced opening its cloud platform to enterprises, researchers and developers. Along with this, Krutrim also announced the release of its Android app.

It is pertinent to note that this isn’t the first time that Aggarwal has taken on the dominance of a multinational giant. Electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer Ola Electric moved away from using Google Maps to the group’s in-house Ola Maps in January. The company commercially launched the maps with the mass roll-out of the Move OS 4 software platform for its electric two-wheelers in January.

Aggarwal’s tussle with the tech behemoth comes at a time when Ola Cabs and Ola Electric are looking to go public. While the EV maker filed its draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) for an INR 5,500+ Cr initial public offering (IPO) in December 2023, Ola Cabs is said to be looking to file its DRHP with SEBI for a $500 Mn IPO by July.