Bengaluru-based multi-utility electric scooters startup kWh Bikes has recently raised $2 million in a seed round led by Let’s Venture, with Better Capital and Cloud Capital also participating. With this, the startup is planning to take its prototype to production and expand R&D across various EV components like battery, BMS, VCU, and motor.
The funding is amongst the largest seed round in the Indian EV space so far with participation from Renu Satti (ex-CEO, Paytm Payments Bank), Vijay Shekhar Sharma (CEO, Paytm), Rajiv Nazareth (ALF Engineering), Paresh Sukthankar (ex-Deputy MD, HDFC), Dipak Gupta (MD, Kotak), Matt Van Horn (Co-founder, Lyft), Haresh Chawla (ex-Group CEO, Network 18), Ravish Naresh (CEO, Khatabook), Rohit Chanana (Sarcha Advisors), Hitesh Oberoi (CEO, InfoEdge), T Gautham Pai (MD, Manipal Media), Gaurav Munjal (CEO, Unacademy), and Kirill Kozhevnikov (Partner, RTP Global), amongst others.
Founded in March 2020, the brains behind kWh Bikes are electrical & electronics engineers: second-time entrepreneur Siddharth Janghu, whose previous venture was backed by Tiger Global, and Kartik Gupta, who headed software projects at Tesla and BMW and moved from Silicon Valley back to India. Siddharth credits his wife Anupriya, a London School of Economics alumna for the inception of kWh Bikes who encouraged him to consider an endeavour in the EV space.
kWh Bikes is building the world’s strongest, smartest, safest, and best performing multi-utility electric scooters. The team has successfully built a working prototype from scratch and is now engineering their production-ready scooter, which will be completely designed and developed in India with an in-house powertrain, something that most Indian EV OEMs are not doing.
Speaking on the announcement, Co-founder & CEO Siddharth Janghu quotes, “With these funds, we are gearing up to extensively test our prototype, continue our work on components like the battery, motor, and VCU, get them homologated, and enter into batch production. The fact that we are a vertically integrated and not an assembled product, helps us get superior performance and in the long-term, that is what will matter. The best product will win, and we are confident about that being ours.”
Co-founder and CTO, Kartik Gupta adds, “We are building electric scooters that have software capable of creating efficient and optimized power trains. We are also building software-driven superior robust battery packs, which make our vehicles deliver high performance in extreme conditions.”
Sunitha Ramaswamy, President, Early Stage, Let’s Venture, said “The automotive industry has been rapidly evolving in terms of technology. Electric vehicles have been introduced as a clean energy initiative and have come a long way to become an integral part of OEMs. Investors on Let’s Venture see immense potential in India’s EV market. With favourable regulations coming into play we are looking forward to working with Siddharth and the team who now look to scale the future of electric mobility.”
kWh Bikes currently caters to the Indian B2B EV market and soon plans to be available for retail users as well. The founders’ vision is to make kWh Bikes the no. 1 electric two-wheeler manufacturer across the world and make India a superpower in technologies related to Electric Vehicles.
