New Delhi: Ola Electric Mobility’s head of advance battery engineering, Ashok Saraswat, has resigned, becoming the latest of at least half a dozen senior executives who have left the electric vehicle company in the past six months, two people aware of the matter said.

Saraswat had joined SoftBank-backed Ola in 2021. He is likely to move to a conglomerate which is entering the battery business, one of the people said.

Ola Electric did not reply to a question on Saraswat. In a statement to ET, the company, however, said Rajesh Mekkat, who joined it two years ago, was responsible for research and advanced engineering in lithium ion-cell batteries.

Saraswat is leaving even as Ola Electric is set to commence operations at its new R&D facility, Battery Innovation Center. A $500 million campus spread over half a million sq ft in Bengaluru, it will house Ola Electric’s battery research operations and be used for studying new cell forms, as well as for design, fabrication and testing.

“The company is working on next-generation cell technology … ranging from solid-state battery technology to sodium-ion batteries and is hiring global talent across cell domains,” the company said.

The Bhavish Aggarwal-founded startup said it would also hire more than 1,000 employees for its cell project across R&D, product development, equipment, and automation design and engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain. It is also hiring foreign talent for a cell gigafactory, phase one of which will likely be commissioned soon.

The company statement didn’t provide the timeline for the hiring.

Ola Electric, which currently manufactures electric scooters and recently unveiled the prototype of an electric car, is one of the companies selected under the Indian government’s production-linked incentive scheme for advanced chemistry cell battery storage. It plans to launch the first electric car in the summer of 2024.

While the company is moving on its projects, it is also facing exits of senior executives.

Yashwant Kumar, senior director and business head of charging network at Ola Electric, resigned in July. A week before that, Ola Electric HR director Ranjit Kondeshan had quit.

Chief technology officer Dinesh Radhakrishnan and director-chief engineer Zoeb Karampurwala left the company in April, 2022 after a year in service. Pankaj Sharma, who was its head of sales and distribution, India, was another senior executive who left the EV company this year.

Ola Electric has also made several hirings in top roles. It recently appointed Ramkripa Ananthan as head of design, for both the two-wheeler and four-wheeler divisions. She joined from Mahindra & Mahindra.

It is also hiring for senior roles in manufacturing, supply chain, equipment and automation engineering.

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Even as the company attracted very high-level talents from the industry yet the top deck remained very volatile. Since 2020 on average at least 31 senior executives quit the group while it appointed close to 40 senior officials in the same time period.