February 25, 2021: Battery Smart, which is building India's largest network of EV-battery swapping stations for three-wheeled E-rickshaws, announced the closure of its seed round of an undisclosed amount led by Orios Venture Partners, India’s leading early-stage venture capital fund. Angel investment platform Faad Network also participated in the funding round. There are more than 2 Million E-Rickshaws in India , which are actually the largest number of electric vehicles on the road yet, but are not fully utilized for the want of this “Uberised” infrastructure.

Battery Smart was founded in 2020 by IIT Kanpur alumni, Pulkit Khurana and Siddharth Sikka, with past experience at Shuttl, Schlumberger and Opera Solutions. The company provides advanced Li-ion batteries to e-rickshaws on a membership basis where the driver can stop at any of the company’s partner swapping stations and get a fully charged battery against a discharged battery and be back on the road to continue their business. 

“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,” said Pulkit Khurana and Siddharth Sikka, co-founders, Battery Smart.

Battery Smart already boasts of 25 operational battery swap stations in Delhi carrying over 1000 battery swaps every week on its network.  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.