Startup Deep Dive : Zypp Electric — audited losses, an EBITDA pivot, and a Shark Tank rejection

Zypp Electric rents out electric scooters to gig workers, but scooter rental is not what pays its bills. In the year to March 2025, the Gurugram company’s revenue from operations rose 50 percent to ₹438 crore ($45.6 million, converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0), and it still lost ₹107.5 crore — its widest loss yet.

Barely three months after that loss-making year closed, Zypp was telling investment bankers a different story: that its monthly numbers had turned EBITDA-positive from July 2025 onward. Two years before that, on Shark Tank India, the same founders had been turned down by investors who called the business commoditised and its cash burn uncomfortable. Zypp Electric has since raised its reported valuation past $270 million, signed up dozens of companies for last-mile delivery, and hired investment bankers for a possible $200 million initial public offering by 2028. How a scooter-rental idea that sharks rejected got here is really a story about what a fleet business quietly sells instead.

Quick facts

What they do

Zypp Electric leases and finances electric scooters, mopeds and small cargo three-wheelers, then rents them out to gig delivery riders who work for quick-commerce and food-delivery platforms. It calls this “EV-as-a-service”: the rider does not need to own a vehicle, arrange charging, or handle servicing — Zypp owns the fleet, swaps batteries or charges them at company-run points, insures the vehicles, and takes on the maintenance risk. On the other side of the business, Zypp contracts directly with more than twenty companies — Zomato, Swiggy, Blinkit, Zepto, Amazon, Flipkart, BigBasket, Uber, Rapido and Porter among them — to supply guaranteed delivery capacity, effectively renting out both the vehicle and the labour attached to it as a single logistics unit. By late 2025 the company said it had more than 20,000 vehicles deployed across five metro clusters, with a plan to reach roughly 26,700 vehicles, including 900 three-wheelers, by March 2026.

The origin

Akash Gupta and Rashi Agarwal did not start out building an EV company. Akash had worked at Dell, Airtel, Snapdeal and Mobikwik; Rashi, an IIM Kozhikode MBA, had already run a fashion-tech venture called Let’s Flaunt since 2013. In May 2017 the couple put in roughly ₹25 lakh of their own money and launched Bycshare Technology, a dockless bicycle-sharing app, after trips to European cities showed them cleaner, less congested streets than the ones they commuted on at home. The founding insight was simple: India’s last mile — the short hop between a metro station or a warehouse and someone’s doorstep — was inefficient, polluting and underserved, and a shared, asset-light vehicle fleet could fix it cheaper than everyone buying their own scooter.

The struggle years

The bicycle bet did not work. Each bike was managing only three to four rides a day against an internal target of eight to ten, and the venture’s entire first year of revenue came to about ₹5 lakh. Consumer bike-sharing in Indian cities, it turned out, was a habit nobody had yet formed. The founders read the failure correctly rather than doubling down on marketing: in 2019, after Zomato approached them directly for delivery capacity, they rebuilt the company around electric two-wheelers rented to gig workers for business-to-business delivery — the model that became Zypp Electric. The second setback came later and in public. In 2023, on Shark Tank India, Gupta and Agarwal asked for ₹2.2 crore for 1 percent equity, implying a ₹220 crore valuation. Namita Thapar passed, citing the company’s monthly cash burn, and Anupam Mittal called the last-mile delivery model commoditised; the founders left the show without a deal, at a point when the business was still losing tens of crores a year against comparatively modest revenue.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after in Zypp’s numbers sits around mid-2025. For the full year to March 2025 — audited, filed with the Registrar of Companies — the company’s EBITDA margin was still negative 15.98 percent, on revenue of ₹438 crore and total costs of ₹556 crore; by the company’s own account, that year’s EBITDA margin had been closer to negative 19.3 percent a year earlier, in FY24. Then, starting in July 2025, Zypp told reporters and, later, prospective IPO bankers that its month-on-month EBITDA had turned positive, with margins improving to roughly 2 percent by September 2025 on the back of a fleet that had doubled in six to seven months and a revenue run-rate the company was projecting to reach ₹600 crore for FY26. That is a genuine inflection if it holds — from a company that lost ₹1.27 for every rupee of revenue in its last audited year to one claiming operating breakeven within months — but it rests on unaudited, company-stated monthly figures rather than a filed annual result, which is why the audited FY25 loss and the “we’re EBITDA-positive now” claim can both be true at once.

The money behind it

Zypp Electric has raised roughly $76.5 million in aggregate funding since 2017, largely from strategic and venture investors rather than a single marquee round. Gogoro, the Taiwanese battery-swapping and electric-scooter technology group, led a $25 million Series B in February 2023 (alongside $5 million in debt from the impact fund IIX), bringing global two-wheeler engineering credibility and battery-swap know-how to a company that was, until then, mostly an Indian growth story. ENEOS, Japan’s largest oil and energy conglomerate, put in roughly $14 million (₹116 crore) as part of a Series C round disclosed in May 2024, explicitly to help fund expansion beyond India and to plug into ENEOS’s energy-infrastructure relationships. Indian Angel Network’s IAN Fund joined the same Series C round in April 2024, adding a domestic institutional investor to a capitalisation table that had, until then, leaned heavily on Gogoro and a cluster of early angel platforms such as 9Unicorns, Venture Catalysts and We Founder Circle. Reported valuations reflect that staged history rather than one clean number: Entrackr and TheKredible pegged the post-Series C valuation at about $271 million (₹2,253 crore) in May 2024, while Tracxn separately estimated it at $332 million as of March 2025. As of June 2026, Zypp was reportedly seeking a further $40–50 million pre-IPO round from private equity and impact-focused funds, aiming to close that gap before an FY28 listing.

How it makes money

The part most outsiders get wrong is assuming Zypp is primarily a vehicle-rental business, the way a bike-rental kiosk is. It is not: in FY25, rental income from riders — roughly ₹250 a day per vehicle — brought in ₹111 crore, just a quarter of operating revenue. The larger share, ₹323 crore or about 74 percent, came from delivery-services commissions: Zypp is paid a fixed fee per delivery by its corporate clients, passes a cut of that to the rider who actually made the trip, and the rider then pays part of that cut straight back to Zypp as the vehicle’s daily rent. In effect, Zypp collects twice from the same transaction — once as a logistics vendor, once as a landlord for the vehicle the logistics job requires — which is also why its costs move with rider activity rather than staying fixed like a pure rental company’s would. Two smaller, newer lines sit on top: Zypp Ads, a rider-facing advertising product launched in July 2025 that had generated about ₹30 lakh by the time it was reported on, and FleetEase.ai (also referred to as Fleekies.ai), fleet-management software Zypp licenses to third-party fleet owners for ₹149 to ₹499 per vehicle per month, projected at roughly ₹40–60 lakh of FY26 revenue. Neither yet moves the needle financially, but both are attempts to monetise the operational software Zypp built for itself in the first place.

The numbers

Three consecutive fiscal years, drawn from the company’s own regulatory filings as reported by Entrackr, show revenue scaling faster than losses have narrowed:

Revenue grew roughly 4x over those two years while the loss grew roughly 2.7x — losses are rising in absolute terms but shrinking relative to scale. FY25’s total expenses came to ₹556 crore, up 42 percent, with rider- and operations-related costs of ₹355 crore making up 64 percent of that bill and growing 49 percent year-on-year; employee benefit expenses rose 43 percent to ₹67 crore. Return on capital employed for FY25 was negative 52.16 percent, and the company’s cash and bank balances stood at ₹72.5 crore against current assets of ₹174.5 crore at year-end — a fleet-heavy, cash-hungry balance sheet typical of a business still scaling its physical assets faster than its margins.

Where the money comes from

Geographically, Zypp’s revenue is still a metro story: Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune accounted for the bulk of its roughly 20,000-vehicle fleet through 2025, with Jaipur becoming the company’s first tier-II city in November 2025 and a stated ambition to be present in 15 to 25 cities within two to three years. By vehicle type, the fleet is still overwhelmingly two-wheelers, but Zypp has begun adding electric cargo three-wheelers — targeting 900 on the road by March 2026 — to chase the heavier-payload, higher-revenue-per-trip segment that quick-commerce warehouses increasingly need. On the client side, the surprise is concentration rather than diversity: a handful of quick-commerce and food-delivery names — Zomato, Swiggy, Blinkit, Zepto, Amazon and, more recently, Rapido, Porter and BBNow — generate the overwhelming share of the delivery-commission revenue that now makes up three-quarters of the business, even though Zypp lists more than twenty corporate clients in total. The company itself has pointed to unmet demand rather than a client shortage as its real constraint, saying in 2025 that it was sitting on 60,000 to 80,000 letters of intent from prospective clients and fulfilling only around a fifth of that pipeline because it did not yet have enough vehicles and riders to service it.

The risks

The first risk is about the people who actually make the deliveries. Reporting by Forbes India in November 2023, drawing on Fairwork India researchers and the All India Gig Workers Union, found that Zypp charged riders a flat daily rent — then around ₹175, since risen toward ₹250 — regardless of how much a rider earned that day, and that average monthly pay for some riders fell below Delhi’s semi-skilled minimum wage of ₹19,279. Security deposits were often not fully returned because of repair and damage deductions, and multiple, overlapping reporting lines made grievance redressal confusing in practice even though the company advertises a 20-minute resolution policy. As India’s gig-work classification rules firm up, this is as much a regulatory and reputational exposure as a labour one. The second risk is structural: Zypp’s model is capital-intensive by design — it owns or finances the fleet, not just the software layer around it — and FY25’s negative 52.16 percent return on capital employed shows how much cash that consumes before it turns into margin. An IPO built on translating recent unaudited, monthly EBITDA gains into a full audited profitable year is a narrower path than the company’s public messaging suggests. The third risk is customer concentration: with roughly three-quarters of revenue tied to delivery commissions from a small set of quick-commerce and food-delivery majors, any one of those clients moving to build an in-house EV fleet, or switching to rivals such as Yulu, Baaz or EVeez, would show up in Zypp’s revenue immediately and disproportionately, given how few clients currently carry most of the weight.

The takeaway

Zypp Electric’s real lesson is not about electric scooters at all. It is about which layer of a low-margin, physically messy business is actually worth owning. Delivery platforms did not want to buy, insure, charge and maintain thousands of vehicles, and gig riders did not want to finance one either — so the most defensible position in that chain turned out to be the company willing to sit in the operationally boring middle, carrying the maintenance, financing and workforce-management risk that everyone else on either side of the transaction preferred to pay someone to avoid. That is a transferable idea well beyond EVs: in any gig-economy supply chain, the business that survives long enough to matter is often not the one with the flashiest product, but the one absorbing the least glamorous, hardest-to-outsource risk in the middle of it.

Frequently asked questions

What does Zypp Electric actually do?

It leases electric two- and three-wheelers to gig delivery riders and contracts directly with quick-commerce, food-delivery and e-commerce companies to supply guaranteed last-mile delivery capacity, earning both rental income from riders and commission income from corporate clients.

Who founded Zypp Electric, and when?

Akash Gupta and Rashi Agarwal, a husband-and-wife team, founded the company in Gurugram in 2017, originally as a bicycle-sharing app called Bycshare Technology, before pivoting to electric two-wheeler delivery in 2019.

How much funding has Zypp Electric raised, and at what valuation?

The company has raised roughly $76.5 million in total, led at various stages by Gogoro, ENEOS and IAN Fund among others. Its valuation is reported, not confirmed, at about $271 million as of its May 2024 Series C (Entrackr/TheKredible) and around $332 million as of March 2025 (Tracxn).

Is Zypp Electric profitable?

Not on an audited annual basis: it reported a net loss of ₹107.5 crore for FY25 (year to March 2025), on revenue of ₹438 crore. The company has said its month-on-month EBITDA turned positive from July 2025, but that claim has not yet been reflected in an audited full-year result.

Is Zypp Electric planning to go public?

Yes. In June 2026 it appointed Axis Capital, SBI Capital Markets and DAM Capital as bankers for a proposed initial public offering of up to $200 million, targeting a listing in FY28, alongside a pre-IPO private round of $40–50 million.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Zypp Electric revenue grows 50% in FY25; losses stands at Rs 107 Cr”, February 2026
• Entrackr, “Zypp Electric reports Rs 303 Cr revenue in FY24 as losses rise 2.2X”, October 2024
• Entrackr, “Zypp Electric secures $14 Mn from ENEOS”, May 2024
• TechCrunch, “Zypp Electric grabs $25M Series B funding led by Gogoro”, February 2023
• Inc42, “Zypp Electric Gears For $200 Mn IPO, Eyes Listing In FY28”, June 2026
• Inc42, “What Will Drive Zypp Electric To INR 1000 Cr Milestone?”, March 2025
• Inc42, “Inside Zypp Electric’s Bold Diversification Drive Beyond India’s Tier I”, November 2025
• Forbes India, “EV logistics platform Zypp zooms 5x in revenues, but rider-partners on shaky ground”, November 2023
• The Weekend Leader, “On fast lane” (profile of Akash Gupta and Rashi Agarwal), April 2023
• Tracxn, company profile and shareholding data for Zypp Electric, valuation as of March 2025
• YourStory, “Zypp Electric grabs $25M Series B funding led by Gogoro”, February 2023
• DealStreetAsia, “Gogoro-backed Indian EV startup Zypp eyes $70-80m in Series C funding”
• Startup media reporting on Zypp Electric’s 2023 Shark Tank India appearance and its ₹220 crore implied ask valuation, aggregated across multiple 2026 syndications

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