Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, founders of India’s leading ecommerce portal Flipkart, have just invested in a Bangalore-based startup Ather making electric two-wheelers which will have more efficiency and speed than those currently available in India. Raju Venkatraman, serial entrepreneur and CEO of Medall, a chain of medical diagnostic centers, also participated in the US$1 million funding.
The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, incubated Ather, which was founded by Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain last year. Mehta and Jain majored in engineering design from IIT Madras, and hold six patents between them. Ather has a team of 15 engineers, most of whom were involved in designing Formula SAE race cars for university competitions.
“Electric vehicles are still at a very nascent stage in India and our aim is to develop and introduce efficient electric scooters which will benefit the country and help manage its resources more effectively,” says Tarun Mehta in a statement on the funding.
Ather has completed the initial performance validation of its vehicle. A key feature is a battery pack three times lighter than current ones. The new model can be charged 80 percent within an hour. It also has a much more powerful motor, which overcomes the pickup and speed constraints of current electric nikes and scooters. “A scooter which can out-accelerate its petrol counterparts, charges up over a lunch break, has an Android dashboard, and a virtually immortal battery pack” is how the Ather website describes it.
Manufacturing partners will be brought on board after this funding round, which endorses the progress of the product. Ather had initially raised seed money in February this year from the Technology Development Board of the Indian government and Silicon Valley database wiz V Srinivas, founder of the open source NoSQL maker Aerospike.
Road bump: the powerful petroleum lobby
Ather is also a member of the Indian government’s Technology Advisory Group for Electric Mobility. The government had launched a National Mission for Electric Mobility last year – one of its objectives is to support green entrepreneurs. More than 35 million two-wheelers are expected to be running in India by 2020, contributing to pollution as well as a huge oil import bill.
Initiatives such as Ather can mitigate these problems, but the government can do much more to set up supporting systems than it has done so far. An infrastructure of charging stations for electric vehicles and tax rebates on the purchase of environmentally-friendly products have been in the air for some time now. Green activists claim that supportive measures have been slow in coming because of a powerful petroleum and automotive industry lobby in the country. “From a manufacturer of bearings to a maker of springs, everything that goes into a petrol or diesel vehicle works against us,” another electric bike maker Dhivik A, told me.
The support for Ather holds out hope that the electric mobility mission does not remain only on paper. “We believe that the world is moving towards a smarter, more energy-efficient and environment-friendly approach in our daily lives,” said Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal on the funding of Ather.
See: Startup makes electric bikes that are the perfect blend of hi-tech and hipster
This post They’re making a bike you can charge during lunch break, and got $1M from Flipkart founders appeared first on Tech in Asia.
They’re making a bike you can charge during lunch break, and got $1M from Flipkart founders
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