Ather Energy
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Founders
· Founded 2013 · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
In early 2013, Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain, two close friends and mechanical engineering graduates from IIT Madras who had both worked in corporate automotive engineering, found themselves frustrated by the state of electric vehicles in India. At the time, the few electric scooters on Indian roads were sluggish, fragile plastic vehicles imported as cheap kits from China: they had a top speed of only 25 km/h, used heavy lead-acid batteries that degraded within six months, and broke down constantly. When Mehta and Jain initially set out to build a business, they planned to design better battery packs for existing manufacturers. However, when they visited legacy Indian two-wheeler factories, they discovered that nobody cared about engineering an electric vehicle properly; incumbents viewed EVs merely as a compliance exercise. Mehta and Jain made the daring decision to build an entire smart electric scooter from scratch. Returning to IIT Madras, they received an incubation grant from the Department of Science and Technology and access to the university's research laboratories. For five years, operating out of a small garage in Chennai and later Bengaluru, the founders built dozens of prototypes, painstakingly engineering custom algorithms for regenerative braking and thermal cooling. In 2014, impressed by their engineering rigor, Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal invested $1 million in seed funding. In June 2018, Ather launched the commercial Ather 450, completely resetting Indian consumer expectations and proving that an Indian startup could engineer an electric scooter that was faster, smarter, and more reliable than traditional petrol vehicles.
Ather Energy was founded in 2013 by Tarun Mehta, Swapnil Jain in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India.
The founders established Ather Energy with the objective of solving core inefficiencies in Electric Vehicles (EV), Smart Two-Wheelers, Fast-Charging Infrastructure, Battery Technology & Clean Mobility, laying the foundation for its current global scale.
Even as Ather Energy scales to $260M, the organization maintains the founders' commitment to innovation and customer-centric execution.