[Funding] Battery Smart raises an undisclosed seed round from Orios Venture Partners

EV Startup Battery Smart has announced that it has closed a seed round of an undisclosed amount. Orios Venture Partners led the seed fund round. Angel investment platform Faad Network also participated in the funding round. “The earnings of E-Rickshaw drivers caps as they use lead-acid batteries. They take 10 hours of charging time and have a limited battery life of 6 months. With Battery Smart, we plan to change that,” state the founders. “Now, they will have access to a retrofittable Li-ion battery-as-a-service solution that provides them with a two-minute battery swapping facility. We are also addressing the issue of range anxiety associated with EVs. Further, we aim to reduce the downtime of e-rickshaws to zero and effectively doubling their daily earning.”

IIT Kanpur alumni, Pulkit Khurana and Siddharth Sikka founded the year-old startup to uberise the EV infrastructure. The startup provides advanced Li-ion batteries to e-rickshaws on a membership basis. The drivers can stop at any of the company’s partner swapping stations. They can get a fully charged battery against a discharged battery. This will help them stay on the road to continue their businesses.

The startup aims to create a network by increasing the availability of affordable clean energy-driven transport. They further aim to increase the income of 2 million e-rickshaw drivers and small store owners. There are more than 2 Million e-Rickshaws in India, the company states. This is a large number of EV on the road. But riders cannon fully utilize them due to poor infrastructure.

The market of Battery Smart

Battery Smart already boasts of 25 operational battery swap stations in Delhi. They carry over 1000 battery swaps every week on their network. The company aims to set up a battery swapping station every square km by opening 300 battery swapping stations in Delhi-NCR by the year-end. It further aims to have 5,000 e-rickshaw drivers on its platform in the next 10 months. It has also developed an integrated B2B technology platform over IOT to manage its network. Battery Smart further monitors the utilization and health of the batteries in real-time. Its small store partners are provided with smart chargers and a mobile app to efficiently run the swap operations at their premises.

“Sometimes we forget, we already have 2.5Mn EVs in India. That EV is the ubiquitous E-rickshaw! The E-rickshaw has become the preferred mode of first & last-mile commute in metros like Delhi-NCR as also the only short-distance shared commuting option in smaller cities all over North and East India. The Battery Smart team is opening up 3X capacity for these E-rickshaws. This is a revolution in mobility for the masses and will change the face of short-distance commuting in India ” said Anup Jain, Managing Partner, Orios Venture Partners.