Driving growth for million drivers: EChargeUp

At Capital-A, if it wasn’t obvious, we’re really into electric mobility! and we’re happy to see it’s picking up pace! E-mobility is adding new layers of flexibility to urban transit. The adoption of electric rickshaws in India has increased considerably in the past few years. The need for convenient public mobility options that facilitate travel for short distances is high in the country. Moreover, the need for cheap public mobility is also high in India for mass transportation. That said, one key hurdle remains for EVs of all sizes: Charging. Here’s why,

• It goes without saying that the operating time for an electric vehicle is limited due to charging.
• Most electric vehicles in the country employ slow charging systems that take up to eight hours. This can result in significant revenue loss for people who offer public mobility solutions.

How EChargeUp is solving this?

In comes EChargeUp’s Battery swapping tech, enabling EV owners and drivers to replace discharged batteries with fully charged ones in less than 2 minutes, without assistance. The convenience of their service is very positively impacting EV driver’s daily earnings by significantly reducing downtime.

Varun Goenka and Ankur Madan, founders of EChargeup, are building a unique FI-NE-TECH Platform (Finance-Network-Technology Platform) to power the growth of last-mile mobility drivers and adoption of EV.

• EChargeup helps drivers by reducing their cost of ownership by providing attractive Financing and Battery-as-a-Service offerings. It will enable drivers to own an EV by spending 40% less and earning 80% more.
• The start-up deploys tech at the core of the offering enabling constant monitoring, availability and tracking of batteries all of the data feeding into charting the future growth path of the company for optimizing the battery supply chain, financing requirements and location discovery.
• The asset light model of the business enables scale to contribute majorly to the government’s target of 80 million EVs in the country by 2030.
• EChargeup operates a whopping 150+ battery swapping stations serving the e-rickshaws in Delhi NCR region — at the heart of India’s EV revolution. It serves more than 1300 active e-rickshaw’s daily through its network stations operated by its partners and has gone from 120 swaps a month to 1,00,000+ swaps a month in 19 months.

EChargeUp raised funds!

EChargeup has raised $7 million in a Pre-Series A1 round! It was led by Capital-A and Anicut Capital along with other marquee investors, including Ekta Kapoor, Sunil Kalra, and Sachin Mehra. Jiraaf, a platform for high-yield alternative investment opportunities, also participated in the round by extending debt to EChargeup.

This funding will be infused into expanding the services to 20 new cities and power 50,000+ drivers. It will also strengthen FineTech Platform and tech stack to ensure 100% uptime and a seamless customer experience.

EChargeUp has enabled over 2,000 drivers to cover more than ten million km of emission-free commute by spending merely one rupee per km since it was established. We are proud to partner with on its’s mission to power 1 million drivers by 2027 and help drive mass EV adoption through solving various challenges present in the ecosystem, right from cost of ownership to range anxiety!

And truly, Every swap counts.

At Capital A, we have set up a $10 million cleantech fund ‘Evolve’ to support the evolution of the EV ecosystem through investments in areas of battery technology, battery swapping, power trains, battery management systems, charging infrastructure, and other related adjacencies.