Startup Deep Dive : Euler Motors — it lost Rs 200 crore on Rs 192 crore of revenue, and Hero MotoCorp bought a third of it anyway

In FY25, Euler Motors sold 3,305 electric commercial vehicles, booked Rs 192.3 crore in operating revenue, and still lost Rs 200.2 crore, according to regulatory filings reviewed by Entrackr. That is close to a rupee of loss for every rupee earned, the kind of ratio that usually sends serious industrial money running.

Instead, in March 2025 Hero MotoCorp, India’s largest two-wheeler maker, paid Rs 525 crore for a 32.5% stake in this same loss-making company, as reported separately by Inc42 and YourStory. The bet: that being India’s number two seller of electric cargo vehicles, ahead of Mahindra and behind only Tata Motors, is worth financing through years of red ink.

Quick facts

What they do

Euler Motors designs, builds and sells electric commercial vehicles for people who move goods for a living: last-mile delivery riders, small fleet owners, and logistics companies. Its original product, the HiLoad EV, is an electric three-wheeler cargo vehicle rated to carry 688 kg, built for intra-city freight runs of the kind that companies such as BigBasket and Flipkart contract out at scale, as Forbes India has reported. In 2026 the company added a second vehicle class, the Turbo EV1000, a one-tonne electric mini-truck priced from Rs 5.99 lakh, aimed at the slightly heavier cargo segment that vans and small trucks currently serve. Euler does not just sell metal and batteries. It runs a network of more than 200 charging stations, operates service centres, and arranges financing tie-ups so that a driver who cannot pay upfront can still get a vehicle on the road, according to Forbes India’s reporting on the company’s model. As of its March 2026 fundraising update, Euler said it was present in 60 Indian cities and had over 15,000 vehicles deployed with fleet and delivery customers, per Entrackr.

The origin

Saurav Kumar is a second-time founder. His first company, Cube26, built hardware-software products and was sold to Paytm in 2017, Forbes India reported. Kumar’s own background is technical rather than automotive: at Delhi College of Engineering and later at Cornell University he built aerial and underwater vehicles, not trucks. The idea for Euler Motors came from a different place entirely, air pollution. Kumar has been quoted by Forbes India making the case that India was home to 18 or 19 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, and that vehicle emissions were a major, addressable part of that problem. He founded Euler Motors in 2018, working initially out of a vendor’s workspace in Faridabad, and named the company after the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. The founding insight was narrow and practical rather than sweeping: urban cargo movement, not passenger transport, was the segment where electric vehicles could displace diesel and petrol fastest, because delivery routes are short, predictable, and run on fixed depots where charging infrastructure is easier to control.

The struggle years

The first hard problem Kumar ran into was not sales, it was batteries. Battery packs are the single largest cost in an electric vehicle, and Kumar spent close to eight months learning the technology from scratch, according to Forbes India’s account of the company’s early days. He took apart Tesla battery packs sourced from the US and China to understand their construction, consulted with Samsung on cells, and learned pack assembly from a power bank manufacturer in Noida. To even secure factory space and equipment from a vendor, Kumar had to commit to ordering 200 to 300 vehicles upfront, a bet that forced the company to learn manufacturing at a pace it was not ready for. Blume Ventures backed the company in October 2018, when Euler had 20 prototypes running; over the next two years the company built and ran 180 units to accumulate more than a million kilometres of real-world testing data before formally launching the HiLoad EV in 2021, per Forbes India.

The pressure did not end once vehicles were on the road. In April 2023, six months after closing a $60 million Series C round led by GIC, Euler Motors cut about 10% of its workforce, roughly 180 to 200 employees, citing a restructuring “to better deliver to customers as well as to investor expectations of greater efficiency,” Inc42 reported at the time. The layoffs came even as revenue had grown sharply, because losses were growing faster: Euler’s net loss had nearly doubled to Rs 36.33 crore in FY22, and operating expenses had risen 1.8 times, Inc42 found in its review of the company’s financials. The damage was not contained to that one year. In FY23, revenue rose to Rs 61.53 crore from Rs 17.57 crore, but net loss spiked nearly fivefold to Rs 174.73 crore, a jump the company attributed to investment in infrastructure and facilities, as reported by outlets tracking its regulatory filings. Losses kept widening the year after that too: FY24 revenue reached Rs 170.82 crore, but net loss grew further to Rs 227 crore, YourStory reported.

The turning point

The turning point was not a product launch, it was a cap table decision. On 20 March 2025, Hero MotoCorp’s board approved an investment of up to Rs 525 crore in Euler Motors, structured as a mix of primary and secondary investment, to acquire roughly 32.5% of the company on a fully diluted basis, as reported by both Inc42 and YourStory. Before that deal, Euler had been raising capital in conventional venture rounds, a $60 million Series C led by GIC in October 2022 and a roughly $24 million round led by Piramal Alternatives in May 2024. After Hero MotoCorp’s entry, the pace and shape of Euler’s funding changed. Hero went on to lead a Rs 638 crore Series D in May 2025 alongside British International Investment, and then, less than a year later, followed on again in a Rs 437.5 crore Series E in March 2026 led by Lightrock, with Blume Ventures also participating, Autocar Professional and Entrackr both reported. In under twelve months, a single strategic auto incumbent had gone from first-time investor to anchor shareholder and repeat lead backer, a shift that gave Euler both capital and a channel partner with a national two-wheeler dealer network to lean on for distribution and manufacturing scale.

The money behind it

Euler Motors has raised approximately Rs 1,900 crore (around $198 million) in total funding since 2018, combining equity and debt, according to Autocar Professional’s report on the company’s March 2026 fundraise. Three backers stand out for what they changed at different stages. Blume Ventures was the earliest institutional believer, backing the company in October 2018 when it had only 20 prototypes running, long before there was revenue to underwrite the risk. GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, co-led the $60 million Series C in October 2022, the round that gave Euler the balance sheet to scale manufacturing but also, as the subsequent layoffs showed, pushed it to justify that capital with efficiency. Hero MotoCorp changed the company’s trajectory altogether: its Rs 525 crore purchase of a 32.5% stake in March 2025 gave Euler a strategic partner with deep manufacturing and dealer-network experience, and Hero has since led or joined every subsequent round, including the Rs 638 crore Series D and the Rs 437.5 crore Series E. Lightrock, which led that most recent Series E round in March 2026 with an additional Rs 250 crore raised in debt from lenders including BlackSoil, Trifecta, InnoVen and Alteria Capital, is the newest name on the register, brought in specifically to fund expansion from 60 to a planned 100 cities. No single, official post-money valuation figure for the company has been published by Euler Motors itself. The clearest public marker is the implied valuation from Hero MotoCorp’s stake purchase, Rs 525 crore for 32.5% works out to roughly Rs 1,615 crore, or about $168 million at the September 2026 exchange rate, though this is a calculation from disclosed deal terms rather than a valuation Euler has confirmed itself.

How it makes money

Euler Motors earns almost all of its money the plain way: by selling vehicles outright. In FY25, vehicle sales alone brought in Rs 173.1 crore, about 90% of the company’s total operating revenue of Rs 192.3 crore, according to Entrackr’s analysis of Vahan registration data and company filings; batteries, accessories and other operating income made up the remaining Rs 12 crore or so, with a further Rs 14.7 crore coming from non-operating income such as interest. This is the detail people tend to get wrong about companies like Euler: because it runs a financing arm and a charging network, outside observers often assume the real business is recurring revenue from leasing, subscriptions or energy sales, the model several electric two-wheeler start-ups have chased. Euler’s financing and charging services are enablers that help a customer say yes to a purchase, not separate profit centres in their own right, at least not yet based on disclosed figures. The cost side explains why the company remains deeply unprofitable despite that revenue. Material costs consumed Rs 192 crore of the company’s roughly Rs 404 crore total expenditure in FY25, about 47.5% of spending, even after a reported 10% reduction from the prior year. Employee benefit expenses rose 46% to Rs 74.4 crore, security and manpower service costs jumped 55% to Rs 24.44 crore, and advertising spending surged 4.6 times to Rs 12.77 crore as the company fought for market share against larger rivals, all figures reported by Entrackr from the company’s FY25 financial statements. Finance costs added another Rs 17.3 crore and depreciation and amortisation Rs 18.46 crore. Put together, Euler’s EBITDA margin stood at a negative 92.6% and its return on capital employed at a negative 93.7% in FY25, meaning the company spent about Rs 2.11 to generate every Rs 1 of operating income, per Entrackr’s calculations from the filings.

The numbers

Euler Motors’ revenue has grown roughly elevenfold over three years, but losses have grown alongside it for most of that period, only narrowing for the first time in FY25.

Euler’s founder has told Business Standard that the company is targeting Rs 400 crore in revenue for FY26, a target roughly double FY25’s operating revenue; this is a company-stated goal rather than an audited outcome and should be read as such until a full-year filing confirms it.

Where the money comes from

By product, Euler’s revenue is still concentrated in one line: vehicle sales, at about 90% of FY25 operating revenue, with batteries, accessories and other operating income making up the balance, per Entrackr’s breakdown of the company’s filings. By vehicle class, the company’s volumes have historically come from the three-wheeler HiLoad EV cargo segment, where Euler said it held roughly a 22% share of the four-wheel cargo EV category by its March 2026 fundraising update, and separate industry sales data reported by Autocar Professional put Euler at around 20% of India’s broader electric commercial vehicle market, enough to overtake Mahindra for the number two position behind Tata Motors in cumulative volumes for the period from January to August 2026. Geographically, the business remains entirely domestic: Euler operates in 60 Indian cities as of its most recent update, with plans to reach 100 by the end of 2026, and there is no disclosed export revenue. The surprise, given how much the company has invested in charging infrastructure, over 200 stations, service centres and financing partnerships, is that none of this shows up as its own revenue segment in the numbers that have been made public. It functions as sales infrastructure, not as a second business line, at least based on what has been disclosed so far.

The risks

The first risk is that Euler’s unit economics have not caught up with its scale. Spending Rs 2.11 to earn Rs 1 of operating income, as Entrackr’s FY25 analysis showed, means the path to breakeven depends on structurally reducing material costs, which alone eat up nearly half of total expenditure, while simultaneously controlling employee and manpower costs that rose sharply in FY25. A second risk is ownership concentration. Hero MotoCorp holds roughly a third of the company and has now led or co-led three consecutive funding rounds, the March 2025 stake purchase, the Rs 638 crore Series D, and a follow-on in the Rs 437.5 crore Series E, according to Inc42 and Autocar Professional. That relationship has clearly benefited Euler’s access to capital and manufacturing know-how, but it also means the company’s strategic runway is increasingly tied to one large auto incumbent’s continued appetite and priorities. The third risk is competitive intensity in a market that is growing fast enough to attract better-capitalised rivals. India’s electric commercial vehicle sales jumped 155% year-on-year in the January to August 2026 period, and while Euler climbed to the number two spot by volume, Tata Motors led the category outright and Mahindra Last Mile Mobility and Bajaj Auto both retain deep manufacturing and dealer networks in adjacent electric vehicle segments, per Autocar Professional’s sales analysis. A market growing this quickly is one where incumbents with existing distribution and cheaper capital can scale rapidly too.

The takeaway

The lesson from Euler Motors is not really about electric vehicles, it is about what kind of validation matters at different stages of a capital-intensive business. Scale and category leadership can arrive years before unit economics do, and the investors who matter most in that gap are rarely the ones chasing the highest growth multiple. They are the strategic ones who need the category to exist regardless of when it turns a profit, in this case an established vehicle manufacturer buying its way into a market it did not want to be shut out of. For any founder building in a hardware-heavy, subsidy-adjacent sector, the practical takeaway is that a widening loss and a rising market share are not contradictory signals, they can be the same signal, and the investors worth courting are the ones who read it that way.

Frequently asked questions

What does Euler Motors make?

Euler Motors makes electric commercial vehicles for cargo and last-mile delivery, principally the HiLoad EV three-wheeler and the newer Turbo EV1000 one-tonne electric mini-truck, alongside charging, service and financing support for its fleet customers.

Who founded Euler Motors and when?

Saurav Kumar founded Euler Motors in 2018 in Faridabad, after selling his earlier hardware-software startup, Cube26, to Paytm in 2017, as reported by Forbes India.

Is Euler Motors profitable?

No. The company reported a net loss of Rs 200.2 crore on operating revenue of Rs 192.3 crore in FY25, an improvement of about 12% from the Rs 227 crore loss reported in FY24, according to Entrackr and YourStory.

Who are Euler Motors’ biggest investors?

Hero MotoCorp is the largest disclosed shareholder, at roughly 32.5% following its March 2025 investment, alongside British International Investment, GIC, Blume Ventures, Piramal Alternatives and Lightrock, which led the company’s March 2026 Series E round.

How does Euler Motors compare to Tata Motors and Mahindra in electric commercial vehicles?

Industry sales data reported by Autocar Professional shows Tata Motors leading India’s electric commercial vehicle segment by volume in the January to August 2026 period, with Euler Motors at roughly a 20% share overtaking Mahindra Last Mile Mobility for the number two position; Bajaj Auto is a significant player in the broader electric three-wheeler category as well.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr, “Euler Motors reports Rs 191 Cr revenue and Rs 200 Cr loss in FY25”, November 2025
• Inc42, “Euler Motors Trims FY25 Net Loss By 12% To INR 200 Cr”, November 2025
• Entrackr, “Euler Motors raises $47 Mn in Series E round led by Lightrock”, March 2026
• Autocar Professional, “Euler Motors Raises INR 437.5 Crore in Series E Round led by Lightrock”, March 2026
• Inc42, “Hero MotoCorp To Acquire Stake In Euler Motors For INR 525 Cr”, March 2025
• YourStory, “Hero MotoCorp to invest Rs 525 Cr in Euler Motors, acquire 32.5% stake”, March 2025
• YourStory, “Euler Motors’ net loss widens to Rs 227 crore in FY24”, November 2024
• Inc42, “Euler Motors Trims 10% Workforce Within 6 Months Of Raising $60 Mn Funding”, April 2023
• Electronics For You, “Euler Motors’ Net Loss Soars To 175.44 Crore In FY23”, 2023
• Forbes India, “Euler Motors: Building high-performance EV three-wheelers to last”
• Business Standard, “Aiming to reach Rs 400 crore revenue in FY26: Euler Motors founder”, September 2025
• Autocar Professional, “Electric CV Sales Jump 155% to 23,540 Units in India”, 2026
• Zeebiz, “Electric commercial vehicle startup Euler Motors raises Rs 638 crore in Series D round”, May 2025
• Motorindia, “Euler Motors Launches Turbo EV 1000, 1-Tonne Affordable e-Mini Truck”

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.