A story of two engineers from IIT-M, who made a design of an electric scooter on paper during their engineering days to today, with a team of more than 150 people and a product ready to roll out of the assembly line and to be handed over to their first few customers on 11th September, the journey of this startup is one among the most inspiring startup stories of India in the automotive domain. It will be really difficult to realize the whole story in a small article, but here’s our piece on India’s very own Ather Energy. 

Coming to the story, Ather Energy was a startup co-founded by Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain, two graduates who were involved in product design and entrepreneurship right from the word go during their engineering. Both of these got into the automotive industry after their studies but got back to the drawing board after a few months of working in the corporate world! October 2013 is when Ather technically started (as stated by Tarun Mehta) and that is when their professor from IIT-M, Mr. Krishnakumar (Yes, the same professor who teaches Vehicle Dynamics on NPTEL) encouraged them to get back to the electric scooter they were working on. They started working on designated projects by their professors but this time with no pressure of assignments, classroom lectures etc. They had access to the college labs and facilities and then came the point where they began realizing many challenges of making an actual prototype from a theoretical design. 

Once their idea had reached a level of maturity, they started hiring more people in the company. It was that time when they took formal incubation into the IIT-M Research Park. They got funded by the college as well as an investment from the alumnus, which was a first for any start-up in IITM. (This was a seed funding from IITMIC and RTBI, angel funding by Raju Venkatraman who’s the CEO of Medall and V Srinivas who’s the founder of Aerospike). They were able to build 4 prototypes in a span of 12 months using these funds, which were basically naked electric scooters which whizzed around the IIT-M campus. This round of investment was raised in February 2014. In the very same year, by December 2014, Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal invested $1 million in Ather.

Seed funding was enough to get to a good point of inflection, where they had a sound know-how about of the design. On 23rd April 2015, Ather gave a glimpse of the prototype and they were ready to bring the product into reality. This is when a ‘Series A’ investment was necessary and they received it as well, through Tiger Global on 29th May 2015. $12 million for development, testing, getting ready for production and launching the vehicle. Soon, their work started on doing the same and within 3 months of time, testing of the prototypes had begun. Galloping ahead with the continuous testings and efforts, they unveiled their vehicle in February 2016, at SURGE. The S340 was ready to be launched for the masses and driven by the public on the Bengaluru roads. But was it really ready?

This is the time after launch when they realized the product needed much more testing and they didn’t have all the capacity to start manufacturing the Ather S340. There are many things to be managed when you turn up for distributing any product to one’s customers and those were the very same things at which Ather got stuck at. By 2016 itself, Ather was able to test their vehicles on tracks, on various paths and do about 10,000 km of road testing. They even had an open house in June 2016 at their facility with all the enthusiasts of Ather. They had beta test rides (in July 2016) with all the product shareholders, in the sense, all the people who were involved with the product, right from the initial stage. The vehicle was ridden exclusively by IIT-M research park incubators (in October 2016) and the people who supported Ather. They were also ridden by future owners of Ather who had pre-booked their Ather S340.

During this time of ado, they raised much needed ‘Series B’ round of investment which was going to be used for setting up the production line, do more engineering work and put more efforts to turn away the charging phobia by introducing a ubiquitous charging infrastructure. It was time to get serious as the investors this time included the 2-wheeler industry biggies, Hero MotoCorp. In October 2016, Hero MotoCorp invested $30 million and gained around 30-35% of stakes in the company. But the roads were different for Ather and Hero. Ather was doing what it started to do, building a product. With the latest flurry of money, Ather got to perceive even more facts in the journey of building a product, which eventually led to a year delay in the launch of Ather S340.

From the time Hero invested into Ather in 2016 to June 2018, they had a crazy crazy journey. From recruiting experienced professionals to building a factory at a defunct railway container manufacturing facility in Whitefield, from working as 75 professionals to 175 people in the company, from a small office to a 70,000 sq. ft office, building product validation and prototyping labs to Making Every Scooter Smart and Intelligent (MESSI) to homologation (how did I miss that) Ather did it all. Ather did come up with a good product proposition before launching their scooter in June 2018 for pre-orders. What they did was to launch Ather Grid, a charging point at every 4 km from any location in the city. On June 5th they started pre-orders and they had a surprise in packs as they didn’t have just S340 but also another product up their kitty, the S450. Both the scooters were open for pre-orders and they also came up with an experience center, unlike any normal scooter sellers.

Now, after receiving a huge number of orders and appreciation from all over the industry, deliveries are going to begin on 11th September. With an already set Ather Grid at multiple places around the city, Bengaluru is going to witness a revolution. 2000 test rides were done at Ather experience center and reviews were duly noted down by the Ather Energy team to get on to the next phase. Applying suitable modifications and doing their efforts to bring the product to the masses, Ather have reached the final stage of the product they envisioned i.e. going into the hands of their customers. There’s a huge effort that goes into converting a few numbers of prototypes into thousands of products coming out of the assembly line. There are trials involved, lists of vendors to handle, manufacturing the vehicles to maintain quality and what not. Production was probably the last challenge as described by Tarun Mehta, which was preceded by designing, testing, sourcing and quality checks, but we know he knows that once the vehicle is in the hands of a customer, there are many more things to come.

A product can keep on improving with the advent of new technology but there has to be a time when it gets launched and the customers use it so that the next product gets more customer-oriented improvements rather than just technological enhancements. Ather Energy now is a team that will dynamically change the Electric Vehicle Scenario in India, as they plan to make more and more products for the Indian masses. They are not just a start-up working on delivering a product, they have turned themselves into the probable ones who will bring tremors to the auto-industry that are still hesitant to opt the future of mobility. Another round of investment through Hero (Series C), $19 million in July is just an indication how times are going to change for EV enthusiasts!

Image courtesy in the article goes to https://twitter.com/atherenergy

For more details on Ather S450 & S340, visit their website – Ather Energy Official Website