Startup Deep Dive : Battery Smart — a swap network that loses money while it triples revenue

Somewhere in India, a battery is swapped into an electric rickshaw roughly once every second of the working day. That number belongs to Battery Smart, which runs it through a network of grocery shops, garages and parking lots rather than anything resembling a petrol pump. Yet in the same financial year that its revenue tripled, the company’s losses more than doubled to ₹140 crore (~$17 million, on operating revenue of ₹164 crore) — a contradiction that sits at the heart of every battery-swapping business, and one this piece tries to unpack.

Battery Smart is now widely described in Indian business media as the country’s largest battery-swapping network for electric two- and three-wheelers, valued at somewhere between $430 million and $450 million depending on which funding filing you read. It has never owned a swap station outright, never manufactured a battery, and still built a network that reportedly handles well over 100,000 swaps a day. How a company with almost no fixed assets became one of India’s most closely watched EV infrastructure bets — and why it is still losing money while doing it — is the story below.

Quick facts

What they do

Battery Smart sells uptime to people who cannot afford to lose it. Its customers are drivers of electric rickshaws and electric two-wheelers — mostly last-mile delivery riders and passenger e-rickshaw operators in Delhi-NCR, Uttar Pradesh and other states — who need a full battery every few hours and cannot wait for one to charge. Instead of owning a battery outright, a driver rents one from Battery Smart and swaps a depleted pack for a charged one in about two minutes at any of the company’s outlets, paying a flat daily or per-swap fee. The outlets themselves are rarely owned by Battery Smart: they are typically a shop, garage or parking lot whose owner has agreed to host the company’s charging cabinets and battery inventory as a side business. As per company and investor accounts, the network spans more than 1,500 stations across 50-plus cities and processes over 100,000 swaps a day, serving roughly 70,000 drivers daily, according to a 2025 commentary published by investor Blume Ventures and corroborated by The Better India’s 2024 reporting, which put the station count at 1,600-plus across 50-plus cities as of August 2024.

The origin

Pulkit Khurana and Siddharth Sikka met in the hostels of IIT Kanpur in 2008. Their first venture together, launched in 2015, was a bootstrapped bus-based commute platform for office workers — a business that ran straight into better-funded competitors and eventually shut down. Khurana then spent roughly four years at Shuttl, one of those competitors, learning the mechanics of shared mobility from the inside, while Sikka moved into policy work with the Uttar Pradesh government and NITI Aayog on electric-vehicle initiatives, as reported by Blume Ventures’ account of the founders’ journey. In 2019 the two quit their jobs and spent six months travelling to smaller Indian cities to study how electric rickshaws actually worked on the ground. What they found was a market hiding in plain sight: an estimated 10-15 lakh e-rickshaws already running on lead-acid batteries that needed replacing every six to eight months and took ten to twelve hours to recharge overnight, eating directly into a driver’s earning day. The founding insight was simple to state and hard to execute: separate the battery from the vehicle, and sell charged batteries as a service rather than as a one-time purchase.

The struggle years

Battery Smart launched with roughly $350,000 in seed capital in the first COVID-19 lockdown of 2020 — about as difficult a moment as any to ask investors to back a network of physical swap counters. Several investors reportedly dismissed e-rickshaws as too niche and too low-tech a category to bet on, according to Blume Ventures’ retrospective. The company’s original plan was to build and staff its own company-run stations, a model that demanded real estate, capital and hiring at a scale the founders could not sustain through a lockdown. That approach had to be abandoned within months in favour of the partner-led model that defines the business today: recruiting existing shopkeepers and garage owners to host swap cabinets rather than opening outlets of its own. Financially, the strain shows up clearly in the company’s early filings: FY22 operating revenue was just ₹7.95 crore against a net loss of ₹13.08 crore, and by FY23 the loss had grown to roughly ₹61 crore even as revenue rose to about ₹56 crore, as per filings reported by Entrackr. Growth was real, but so was the cash burn, and the company remained dependent on successive funding rounds through 2021 and 2022 simply to keep the network open.

The turning point

The inflection point was not a product launch or a marquee funding round; it was a regulatory accident. When the Indian government classified e-rickshaws as an essential service during the 2020 lockdowns, Battery Smart’s early partner stations were allowed to keep operating while much of the rest of the economy was shut down, according to Blume Ventures’ account. That kept the fledgling network alive and gave the founders real usage data at a moment when almost no other mobility business had any. The pivot to a partner-run model turned into the company’s structural advantage once demand returned: instead of the founders financing real estate and staff for every new station, local partners now put up roughly ₹7.5-8 lakh for a swap-cabinet franchise and typically recover that investment within about a year, earning ₹25-30 per swap transaction, per Blume Ventures’ figures. That asset-light expansion mechanism is why a company that opened its first station in June 2020 could report over 1,500 stations across 50-plus cities within about five years, rather than the decade a real-estate-heavy rollout would likely have taken.

The money behind it

Battery Smart’s capital raising has been near-continuous since 2021. Orios Venture Partners backed a February 2021 seed round, Blume Ventures led a $7 million pre-Series A that November, and Tiger Global led a $25 million Series A in June 2022 that made it the company’s largest single institutional shareholder, with roughly 26.3% of the cap table after that round, according to Entrackr’s 2023 shareholding analysis. A July 2023 pre-Series B brought in $33 million from Tiger Global, the Ecosystem Integrity Fund, Blume Ventures, British International Investment and Stride Ventures at a post-money valuation of roughly $210 million, up from about $126 million previously — a 65% jump reported by Entrackr. The Series B proper arrived through 2024: a $45 million tranche in May followed by a $65 million close in June led by LeapFrog Investments, with MUFG Bank, Panasonic, Tiger Global, Blume Ventures, the Ecosystem Integrity Fund and British International Investment all participating, per LeapFrog’s own press release. The round was extended again in mid-2025 with $21-29 million from Rising Tide Energy, the Asia Climate Fund, the Ecosystem Integrity Fund and Acacia Inclusion, pushing the reported valuation to $450 million as of June 2025, a 32% step-up from the prior $340 million mark, according to Entrackr. Most recently, a Series C tranche of roughly $19.5 million (₹185.5 crore) led by Rising Tide Ventures, with the Ecosystem Integrity Fund and Blume Ventures, was recorded in regulatory filings in August 2026 at a post-money valuation of ₹4,075 crore, or about $430 million — a figure close to but not identical to the $450 million mark reported a year earlier, a gap that filing-based trackers attribute to round structure rather than a confirmed down round. Cumulative funding is reported at roughly $170-176 million in equity as of mid-2025 by Entrackr, rising to about $228 million once debt facilities — including a 2026 facility from Mirova — are counted, per Inc42’s funding tracker. LeapFrog brought impact-investing discipline and emerging-markets distribution experience; Tiger Global brought growth-stage capital and board heft as the largest shareholder; Blume Ventures, the earliest institutional backer, has stayed in every round since 2021.

How it makes money

The revenue model has two legs. Drivers pay Battery Smart a flat fee per swap or per day — reportedly in the range of ₹240-360 daily depending on usage — to access a charged battery whenever they need one, per Blume Ventures’ account of the unit economics. Partners who host a swap cabinet pay Battery Smart an upfront franchise-style fee of roughly ₹7.5-8 lakh for a multi-year contract and then earn a per-transaction margin of about ₹25-30, while Battery Smart retains the rest of the driver’s fee. The company, not the partner, owns the actual capital-intensive asset: the lithium-ion battery packs and the charging cabinets, sourced from more than ten battery manufacturers to support over 200 vehicle models, according to The Better India’s 2024 reporting. That is the detail most outside observers get backwards — they assume the real estate is the expensive part of a swap network, the way it is for a fuel station, when in Battery Smart’s model the real estate is contributed almost for free by partners and the balance sheet weight sits entirely in owning and cycling thousands of batteries. The cost of running each swap — electricity, battery depreciation and cabinet upkeep — has been estimated at roughly ₹100-150, against swap-linked revenue per transaction that the company needs to keep above that line to make the model work at scale. In FY24, the company was still spending about ₹1.99 for every rupee of operating revenue earned, a ratio that per Entrackr’s FY25 reporting had improved to about ₹1.22 by FY25, the year Battery Smart said it reached operating break-even and turned EBITDA positive, even though it still posted an EBITDA loss of ₹56 crore for the year — a company-stated milestone that the numbers only partly bear out.

The numbers

Figures below are as reported in company financial filings analysed by Entrackr; all amounts in ₹ crore.

The pattern is a company scaling revenue fast — roughly 193% growth in FY24 and a further 52% in FY25 on operating revenue — while losses grew even faster through FY24 before the cost-to-revenue ratio finally began to narrow in FY25, according to Entrackr’s successive filings-based reports. The company has publicly framed FY25 as the year it crossed into operating break-even, though it has not disclosed a full net profit-and-loss figure for that year, only the EBITDA loss of ₹56 crore.

Where the money comes from

Battery Smart does not publish a city-wise or state-wise revenue split, so the geographic concentration of its business can only be inferred rather than quantified. What is documented is a channel split: revenue arrives from driver-side swap fees on one side and partner-side franchise and licensing payments on the other, with the company retaining the spread between what a driver pays per swap and what a hosting partner earns per transaction. Geographically, the founders built the model first in Delhi-NCR and Uttar Pradesh, where the original e-rickshaw research was done, before expanding to more than 50 cities, per Blume Ventures and The Better India’s reporting — but neither source discloses what share of current revenue still comes from that founding cluster versus newer markets. The one segment split that is documented is vehicle type: the network supports more than 200 two- and three-wheeler models across more than ten battery-pack suppliers, meaning revenue is not concentrated on a single OEM’s ecosystem, which reduces the company’s exposure to any one vehicle manufacturer’s fortunes. The surprise, given how the business is described in the press, is how little of its revenue mix has actually been made public relative to how confidently outsiders describe it as “India’s largest” network.

The risks

The first risk is unit economics that are still not fully proven at scale. Even after improving from ₹1.99 to about ₹1.22 spent per rupee of operating revenue between FY24 and FY25, Battery Smart posted an EBITDA loss in the same year it claimed operating break-even, according to Entrackr’s reporting — a reminder that “break-even” and “profitable” are not the same claim, and that further margin improvement depends on cost lines like battery depreciation and finance costs that rose sharply in FY24 (finance costs up 3.75 times, depreciation up 3.8 times year-on-year, per the same filings). The second risk is competitive intensity in a market without settled battery or cabinet standards: Sun Mobility operates through a joint venture with Indian Oil Corporation that gives it access to the fuel-retail network’s real estate, while other players such as VoltUp and Mooving compete for the same partner shopkeepers and driver base; estimates of Battery Smart’s own market share range from about 15% of installed swap cabinets in earlier industry tracking to roughly 36% of the swapping sector cited by YourStory in August 2025 — a wide enough range, reflecting different measurement bases, that neither figure should be treated as settled. The third risk is policy dependence: India’s battery-manufacturing incentive scheme for advanced chemistry cells has badly underperformed its targets, with only about 2.8% of committed capacity commissioned on schedule as of October 2025 and large allottees like Hyundai withdrawing entirely, according to industry tracking — a slow domestic cell-manufacturing ramp keeps swap-network operators like Battery Smart more exposed to imported battery costs and currency risk than a mature market would allow.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from Battery Smart is not that battery-swapping is inherently a good business — the loss figures argue against that being obvious — but that in an infrastructure network with two customer types, the side to de-risk first is the one supplying your fixed assets, not the one paying your top-line fee. Battery Smart’s founders did not try to win drivers with subsidised swap fees; they won shopkeepers and garage owners with a franchise payback of about a year and near-zero capital outlay, and let driver adoption follow the resulting station density. Any founder building a two-sided physical network — swap stations, dark stores, EV charging, even offline retail — is choosing, whether they realise it or not, which side absorbs the capital risk; Battery Smart’s bet was to keep that risk on its own balance sheet in the form of owned batteries while pushing real-estate risk onto partners, and to fund that bet with nearly continuous external capital rather than internally generated cash. Whether that remains fundable if growth-stage money tightens is the open question the company has not yet had to answer.

Frequently asked questions

What does Battery Smart actually do?

It runs a battery-swapping network for electric two- and three-wheelers: a driver exchanges a depleted battery for a charged one in about two minutes at a partner-run outlet, paying a per-swap or daily fee, instead of owning a battery and waiting hours for it to charge.

How much funding has Battery Smart raised, and who backs it?

Cumulative funding is reported at roughly $170-176 million in equity as of mid-2025 by Entrackr, and around $228 million once debt facilities are included, per Inc42’s tracker current to April 2026. Key backers across rounds include Tiger Global, LeapFrog Investments, Blume Ventures, MUFG Bank, Panasonic and Rising Tide Ventures.

Is Battery Smart profitable?

Not on a net-profit basis as of the last disclosed figures. The company posted a net loss of ₹140 crore in FY24 and, while it said it reached operating break-even in FY25, it still recorded an EBITDA loss of ₹56 crore that year, per Entrackr’s filings-based reporting.

What is Battery Smart’s latest valuation?

Recent regulatory filings put it at roughly ₹4,075 crore (about $430 million) as of an August 2026 Series C tranche, close to the $450 million reported after a June 2025 Series B extension, according to Entrackr and filing trackers.

Who competes with Battery Smart?

Sun Mobility, which partners with Indian Oil Corporation, along with VoltUp and Mooving, are commonly cited competitors in India’s two- and three-wheeler battery-swapping market; estimates of Battery Smart’s own share of that market range from about 15% to 36% depending on the source and metric used.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, November 2023 — “Decoding Battery Smart’s latest funding round, valuation and shareholding”
• Entrackr (Fintrackr), May 2025 — “EV firm Battery Smart’s net loss doubles to Rs 140 crore in FY24, expenses surge”
• Entrackr (Fintrackr), 2025 — “Battery Smart’s revenue triples in FY24 but losses widen over 2X”
• Entrackr (Fintrackr), September 2025 — “Battery Smart posts Rs 250 Cr revenue in FY25”
• YourStory, September 2025 — “Battery Smart turns EBITDA positive, 52% surge in FY25 revenue”
• YourStory / X (YourStory Co.), August 2025 — reporting on founders, 1,500+ stations and market-share estimate
• Blume Ventures, 2025 — “Hidden in plain sight: how two IITians electrified India’s last mile one battery swap at a time”
• The Better India, August 2024 — “Battery Smart: IIT Grads’ Startup Doing 1 Lakh EV Battery Swaps a Day”
• LeapFrog Investments, June 2024 — press release, “Battery Smart raises $65m in Series B funding round led by LeapFrog Investments”
• Entrackr, June 2025 — “Battery Smart’s extended Series B round pushes valuation to $450 Mn”
• Bhavya Sharma & Associates (funding-filing tracker), August 2026 — “Battery Smart $19.5 million Series C, Rising Tide Ventures”
• Inc42 company funding tracker, accessed September 2026 — “Battery Smart Funding 2026 – Total Funding, Rounds & Investors”

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