How Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain Built Ather Energy Into a Listed Indian EV Manufacturer
India runs on two wheels. With well over 200 million motorcycles and scooters on its roads, shifting that fleet off petrol matters more to Indian emissions than any number of electric cars. In the early 2010s, though, electric two-wheelers in the country were mostly low-speed imports with lead-acid or poorly managed lithium packs: slow, fragile and prone to losing range within a year.
Ather Energy (Ather Energy Limited) is the company that set out to fix that by engineering the whole vehicle. Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain met studying engineering design at IIT Madras, graduated in 2012, and took jobs at Ashok Leyland and General Motors respectively. Both kept coming back to the same observation: the battery pack was the weakest component in India's electric scooters. They quit in 2013, returned to their alma mater and incorporated Ather in Bengaluru.
Thirteen years later Ather is a listed company. It went public on the NSE and BSE on 6 May 2025 after an IPO of ~$346 million (INR 2,981 crore) priced at INR 321 a share, and carried a market capitalisation of roughly ~$6.56 billion (INR 56,516 crore) on 30 September 2026. Hero MotoCorp, the largest two-wheeler manufacturer in the world by volume, is its biggest shareholder with about 32.8 percent on a fully diluted basis. Ather sold 262,942 vehicles in FY2026, 69 percent more than the year before, for ~$426 million (INR 3,672 crore) of revenue and a net loss of ~$60 million (INR 517 crore), and reported its first EBITDA-positive quarter in the three months to June 2026.
From a Battery Pack Idea to a Clean-Sheet Scooter
The original plan was not to build a vehicle. Mehta and Jain wanted to design better lithium-ion packs and sell them to established two-wheeler makers. Touring assembly lines changed their minds: incumbents treated electric vehicles as a compliance exercise, and bolting a pack onto a petrol scooter frame produced poor weight distribution and heat management. If the pack was going to work, the vehicle around it had to be designed for it.
Professor Krishna Kumar at IIT Madras drew the two into entrepreneurship, gave them their first few lakhs and space on campus to work. In early 2014 the Technology Development Board under the Department of Science and Technology, IIT Madras and angel investor Srini V. Srinivasan put in ~$52,200 (INR 4.5 million). That December, Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal invested USD 1 million of seed capital. Tiger Global added USD 12 million in May 2015, and Hero MotoCorp ~$20.9 million (INR 180 crore) in October 2016.
Ather showed its first scooter, the S340, as a concept in Bengaluru on 23 February 2016. It never reached customers in that form. The company went to market in 2018 with the refined Ather 450 and an entry-level 340, discontinuing the 340 in September 2019 for want of demand. The 450 carried an aluminium chassis, an IP67-rated battery pack Ather designed itself, a mid-mounted permanent magnet synchronous motor and a 7-inch Android-based touchscreen with onboard Google Maps, which no two-wheeler maker had put on a dashboard before.
The cost of that approach was time. Ather booked ~$487,200 (INR 4.2 crore) of operating revenue in FY2019, its first year with a vehicle on sale, five years after incorporation, and lost ~$12.5 million (INR 107.5 crore). FY2020 brought ~$4.09 million (INR 35.3 crore) of revenue on 3,007 scooters and a ~$25.5 million (INR 219.9 crore) loss. The company survived on repeated rounds from Hero MotoCorp, Tiger Global and Sachin Bansal.
Battery Engineering and What the Safety Record Actually Shows
Indian conditions are unforgiving for battery packs: high ambient temperatures, flooded roads in monsoon season, and hard use. Ather's answer was to design the pack rather than buy it: a die-cast aluminium enclosure instead of plastic or sheet metal, an in-house battery management system monitoring temperature and voltage across cell groups, and IP67 ingress protection on the pack and motor.
That is not the same as a perfect record, and the claim sometimes made for Ather that it has never had a thermal event is wrong. In May 2022, during the period when more than two dozen Indian electric scooters caught fire and Ola Electric, Pure EV and Okinawa recalled vehicles, a scooter caught fire at Ather's Chennai experience centre. Ather's investigation found a crack in the top casing of an accident-damaged pack had let water in during a pressure wash, triggering thermal runaway. In February 2023 a 450X caught fire in Bengaluru; Ather traced it to a motor-controller connector that had not been torqued correctly on the line, and added a verification step to its assembly process.
What distinguishes Ather is that both incidents were traced to identifiable single causes and neither produced a fleet-wide recall, at a time when several competitors did recall thousands of vehicles.
The Ather Grid and a National Charging Standard
Ather did not wait for third parties to build charging infrastructure. It launched the Ather Grid alongside its first scooter in 2018, installing fast chargers at cafes, malls, offices and fuel stations. By 2026 the network had passed 6,100 public fast chargers across more than 395 cities, the largest dedicated two-wheeler charging network in India.
The more consequential outcome was standardisation. The combined AC and DC connector Ather developed, working with ARAI, NITI Aayog, the Bureau of Indian Standards and other manufacturers including Hero and Ola Electric, was approved by BIS in October 2023 as India's national charging standard for light electric vehicles, published as IS 17017 Type 7 and commonly called LECCS. Ather has offered to help other manufacturers adopt it at no cost. In December 2023 Ather and Hero MotoCorp's VIDA brand opened their networks to each other, covering about 1,900 fast-charging points across 100 cities at the time.
Widening the Range: Rizta, the Public Listing, and Konarc
For its first decade Ather sold to performance-minded urban riders. Most Indian scooters, though, are bought by households wanting space and practicality. Ather addressed that in January 2024 with the 450 Apex at ~$2,192 (INR 1.89 lakh), a 7.0 kW flagship reaching 100 km/h and 0 to 40 km/h in 2.9 seconds that introduced the Magic Twist regenerative throttle, and in April 2024 with the Ather Rizta: a longer seat, 34 litres of under-seat storage, a pillion backrest and SkidControl traction control.
In August 2024 the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund invested USD 71 million at a USD 1.3 billion valuation, Ather's unicorn round, up from roughly USD 750 million in 2022. The IPO followed on 6 May 2025. The debut was muted: the stock listed at INR 328 on the NSE against an issue price of INR 321 and closed its first day at INR 300. It recovered over the following eighteen months, reaching an all-time high of INR 1,717.70 on 31 August 2026.
The bigger strategic move came on 29 August 2026, when Ather launched the Konarc at its Community Day event. Built on a new lower-cost EL platform using a steel chassis instead of aluminium, the Konarc starts at INR 99,999 ex-showroom for the 100 km variant, with INR 1,21,999 and INR 1,44,999 variants above it and a 10-year battery warranty. Mehta has said he expects it to account for more than half of Ather's sales within two years, which would move the company's centre of gravity from premium buyers to people replacing a petrol scooter.
Manufacturing, Distribution and the Capacity Problem
Ather builds at two plants in Hosur, Tamil Nadu, one for vehicle assembly and one for battery packs, with combined installed capacity of 420,000 vehicles and 379,800 packs a year. It produced its 500,000th scooter in October 2025. Retail expanded faster than manufacturing: Ather doubled its network to more than 700 Experience Centres during FY2026 from 351, with service centres rising to around 548, and most new openings outside its southern strongholds. National market share reached 18.8 percent in the quarter to December 2025.
The consequence was a shortage. Waiting periods on some models stretched to about four months in 2026 while Ather waited on Factory 3.0 at Bidkin in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Maharashtra. That plant is due to start production in December 2026 and reach full output from April 2027; phase one adds 500,000 units a year and the site takes Ather's total installed capacity to 1.42 million vehicles annually. It is being funded partly from IPO proceeds and partly from a ~$139 million (INR 1,200 crore) preferential issue completed in July 2026, which included ~$111 million (INR 960 crore) from Hero MotoCorp and ~$23.2 million (INR 200 crore) from the India-Japan Fund.
Where the Financials Stand
Ather's revenue has compounded from ~$487,200 (INR 4.2 crore) in FY2019 to ~$426 million (INR 3,672 crore) in FY2026, and the loss curve has finally turned. The net loss peaked at ~$123 million (INR 1,059.7 crore) in FY2024, fell to ~$94.2 million (INR 812.3 crore) in FY2025 and to ~$60 million (INR 517.2 crore) in FY2026. Gross margin moved from 4.1 percent in FY2022 to 21.1 percent in FY2026. The quarter ended 30 June 2026 produced revenue of ~$141 million (INR 1,216.9 crore), up 89 percent year on year on 88,655 units, a net loss of ~$5.93 million (INR 51.1 crore) and EBITDA of ~$1.1 million (INR 9.45 crore), the first positive EBITDA quarter in the company's history.
Non-vehicle revenue, covering accessories, spare parts, service and software, reached 14 percent of the total in the quarter to December 2025, and Ather incorporated Ather Insurance Limited in May 2026 to distribute policies as a corporate agent once it has an IRDAI licence. Capital intensity remains the constraint: free cash flow was negative ~$55 million (INR 474 crore) in FY2026 with ~$58.7 million (INR 506 crore) of capital expenditure, against ~$289 million (INR 2,489 crore) of cash and investments and ~$77 million (INR 664 crore) of debt at year end.
The shareholder register has changed with the listing. Tiger Global sold its remaining stake of about 5 percent for ~$140 million (INR 1,204 crore) in November 2025, ten years after leading the Series A. Hero MotoCorp went the other way, subscribing to ~$111 million (INR 960 crore) of warrants in July 2026 and then buying up to $204 million (INR 1,758 crore) of shares from another holder, lifting its fully diluted holding from 29.88 percent to roughly 32.8 percent by early September 2026.
Outside India
Exports are still small but growing. Ather entered Nepal in November 2023 with the 450 series, its first international market, working through national distributor Vaidya Energy and building out experience centres and Ather Grid points there. Sri Lanka followed in December 2024 through distributor Evolution Auto, with the Rizta launched at the Colombo Motor Show in November 2025. Chief business officer Ravneet S Phokela said in 2026 that Ather would target further markets in Asia and Latin America, expecting a meaningful revenue contribution over the following five to seven years.
Ather's bet has been consistent since 2013: own the engineering, accept a slower start, and build the charging network the product needs. That bet produced a listed company with a fifth of India's electric two-wheeler market and its first EBITDA-positive quarter. Whether it also produces a profitable mass-market business depends largely on the Konarc and on getting the Bidkin factory running.
