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India-based electric vehicle battery swapping stations for E-rickshaws, Battery Smart has raised an undisclosed amount in series seed round funding led by Orios Venture Partners.
The round also saw the participation from angel investment platform Faad Network.
Founded in 2020 by IIT Kanpur Alumni, Pulkit Khurana, and Siddharth Sikka, Battery Smart provides advanced Li-ion batteries to e-rickshaws on a membership basis.
Speaking on the development, Pulkit Khurana and Siddharth Sikka, co-founders, Battery Smart said, “The earnings of E-Rickshaw drivers is capped as they use lead-acid batteries that need 10 hours of charging time and have a limited battery life of 6 months. With Battery Smart, we plan to change that. 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 addressing the issue of range anxiety associated with EVs, reducing the downtime of E-rickshaws to zero and effectively doubling their daily earning,” Khurana added.
Battery Smart already boasts of 25 operational battery swap stations in Delhi carrying over 1000 battery swaps every week on its network. The company aims to set up a battery swapping station in every square km by opening 300 battery swapping stations in Delhi-NCR by the year-end and onboard 5,000 E-rickshaw drivers on its platform in the next 10 months.
It has developed an integrated B2B technology platform over IOT to manage its network and monitor 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.
Commenting on the investment in Battery Smart, Anup Jain, Managing Partner, Orios Venture Partners said, “Sometimes we forget, we already have 2.5Mn EVs in India and 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. 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.”