Startup Deep Dive : Ampere Vehicles — bought out in full, still losing hundreds of crores a year

Ampere Vehicles is a Coimbatore-built electric scooter maker that a 167-year-old diesel-engine company now owns outright — and full ownership did not fix its books. In FY24 (April 2023 to March 2024), the company’s loss including one-time write-downs came to ₹691.5 crore ($72.0 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics), against operating revenue that had nearly halved that same year, as per its Registrar of Companies filings reported by Entrackr.

The buyer was Greaves Cotton, a Mumbai-headquartered engine maker founded in 1859 that spent most of its history building diesel gensets and pump sets. It took a majority stake in Ampere in 2018 and bought out founder Hemalatha Annamalai’s remaining shares by November 2019, betting that a scrappy tier-2-city EV brand plus a 150-year-old distribution machine would add up to more than either alone. Six fiscal years later, the arithmetic is more complicated than that pitch suggested — but the underlying business, and what its numbers say about building EVs in India, is worth walking through in full.

Quick facts

What they do

Ampere designs and sells low-speed and high-speed electric two-wheelers for Indian commuters, alongside electric three-wheelers for last-mile cargo and passenger use. Its current lineup, per the company’s own site, runs across models such as the Nexus, Magnus and Primus scooters and the Reo three-wheeler family, sold through more than 400 dealerships across India and, the company says, in three countries in total. The customer base splits into two very different buyers: individual commuters looking for a sub-₹1-lakh scooter to replace a petrol two-wheeler, and small businesses and gig fleets buying three-wheelers or delivery scooters for cost-per-kilometre reasons rather than climate ones. That second buyer has mattered more with each passing fiscal year, as the numbers below show.

The origin

Hemalatha Annamalai spent years as a computer science engineer working outside India before the idea for Ampere arrived almost by accident, in a phone call. In June 2007, her husband rang her from a conference in Japan where a Toyota executive had told the room that the internal combustion engine’s era was ending, as recounted in her profile in The Better India. She followed that thread to the International Mobility Conference in Geneva later that year, where the outline of an Indian electric-vehicle company took shape in her head. The insight she kept coming back to, in her own words to that outlet, was that “high-end technology should be accessible to all” — not a product for the wealthy few, but a scooter priced and engineered for the commuter who currently rode a petrol Hero or Honda.

She founded Ampere in 2008, and made a deliberate choice that most Indian automotive startups did not: to build it in Coimbatore, a Tamil Nadu textile-and-engineering town, rather than Bengaluru or the Delhi–NCR belt where most EV and auto-tech capital was clustering. The stated reason, again per The Better India, was to draw on the region’s existing manufacturing talent and stop it from draining toward the metros — a bet that manufacturing discipline mattered more, this early, than proximity to venture capital.

The struggle years

The first setback was simply time. Ampere ran on founder capital and small angel cheques for roughly seven years, from its 2008 founding until 2015, before any recognisable institutional money arrived — an unusually long runway-less stretch for a hardware company building physical vehicles, tooling and a dealer network from a tier-2 city with none of the ecosystem support Bengaluru-based rivals could tap. When capital did arrive, it came from individuals rather than funds: Ratan Tata took a stake in 2015, and Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan joined shortly after, with Ampere’s total disclosed outside funding before its 2018 sale process reported by Inc42 at around $1.2 million — a modest sum for a company already manufacturing and selling vehicles at scale.

The second, sharper setback came years later and under different ownership. In FY24 (April 2023 to March 2024) — five years into full Greaves Cotton ownership — Ampere’s operating revenue fell 46% year-on-year, from ₹1,124 crore in FY23 to ₹612 crore, while its loss multiplied roughly 11 times, from ₹20 crore in FY23 to ₹215 crore on an operating basis, or ₹691.5 crore once one-time costs were included, all as per RoC filings reported by Entrackr. That a company under a listed industrial parent, five years post-acquisition, could still post a fiscal year that bad is itself a data point about how unresolved Ampere’s core economics remained.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after split in Ampere’s history is the Greaves Cotton buyout. On 31 August 2018, Greaves Cotton announced a definitive agreement to acquire a 67% stake in Ampere for about ₹77 crore ($10.8 million), with an option to raise that further within three years, as reported by Inc42 and Autocar Professional at the time. Greaves completed the initial 67.34% purchase in October 2018 for that same ₹77 crore, according to autoX; raised its holding to 81.23% in July 2019 with a further investment reported as ₹38.49 crore by Wikipedia’s sourced account (autoX gives a slightly higher cumulative figure of ₹120.49 crore for the two tranches combined — the two disclosed totals sit in a ₹115–120 crore range for the first two purchases); and closed out full ownership in November 2019 by buying Hemalatha Annamalai’s remaining 18.77% in a secondary purchase, with that final amount undisclosed, per autoX and Business Standard reporting cited therein.

Autocar Professional’s contemporaneous coverage put Ampere, at the moment the deal was announced in August 2018, at more than 35,000 scooters sold cumulatively since its 2008 launch, running roughly 150 dealers across 14 states. By the time of its most recent company-published figures, Ampere states it has sold more than 4,00,000 units since 2019 (the year Greaves took full control), through a network of 400-plus dealerships, with 550-plus employees, per the company’s own “About” page accessed in September 2026. Distribution and volume scaled by more than ten times. Profitability, as the numbers below show, did not follow the same curve.

The money behind it

• Early angel capital: Ratan Tata invested in 2015 (amount undisclosed); Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan and other angel investors followed, with total pre-2018 outside funding reported by Inc42 at around $1.2 million.
• First institutional buyer round: Greaves Cotton signed a definitive agreement on 31 August 2018 to acquire 67% of Ampere for about ₹77 crore ($10.8 million), completing that purchase (67.34%) in October 2018, per Inc42 and autoX.
• Stake increase: Greaves Cotton raised its holding to 81.23% in July 2019 with a further investment reported at ₹38.49 crore (Wikipedia, sourced) to ₹43 crore-plus on autoX’s cumulative figure — sources give a range rather than one number here.
• Full buyout: Greaves Cotton purchased founder Hemalatha Annamalai’s remaining 18.77% in a secondary transaction that closed by November 2019, taking its stake to 100%; the amount was not disclosed, per autoX.
• Current stage: Ampere now operates as a brand inside Greaves Electric Mobility, a Greaves Cotton subsidiary that filed a draft prospectus seeking to raise ₹1,000 crore via an IPO in December 2024, as reported by Entrackr — a filing that had not converted into a completed listing as of the most recent financial disclosures used in this piece.

What each backer changed: Tata and Gopalakrishnan’s money, small as it was, bought Ampere credibility and a further seven years of independent runway after 2015. Greaves Cotton’s money bought something structurally different — an established dealer and service network, working-capital access, and a group balance sheet able to absorb multi-hundred-crore annual losses that would have sunk an independent, thinly-capitalised startup outright.

How it makes money

Ampere earns almost all its revenue from selling vehicles outright through dealers, not from a subscription, battery-swap or fee-based model — money comes in per scooter, cycle or three-wheeler sold, with a smaller stream from scrap and non-operating income. The cost stack tells the more interesting story:

• Cost of materials (batteries, motors, controllers and components) has consistently run 64–74% of total expenses across the fiscal years disclosed: 74% in FY22 and 64% in FY25, per Entrackr’s reporting of RoC filings.
• Employee benefit costs moved from ₹27.26 crore in FY22 to ₹101 crore in FY24 (up 48.5% year-on-year that year) before falling 22% to ₹79 crore in FY25, reflecting a hiring build-up followed by a pullback.
• Warranty expense is the line worth flagging: it rose 4.87 times year-on-year in FY22 alone, to ₹20.03 crore, growing faster than the 2.96-times revenue growth that year — a sign that after-sale costs (battery and component claims) were scaling ahead of unit sales, per Entrackr’s FY22 report.
• The company’s own cost-per-rupee-of-revenue metric, as calculated by Entrackr from its filings, was ₹1.08 in FY22, ₹1.40 in FY24 and ₹1.39 in FY25 — meaning Ampere has spent more than it earned on every rupee of revenue in each of the last three disclosed fiscal years.

The part outsiders tend to get wrong is assuming a scooter-maker’s margin problem is mainly about battery-cell cost, which is falling industry-wide. Ampere’s own disclosed cost lines suggest the bigger swing factors have been warranty and after-sales cost blowouts, and an advertising and promotion line that rose 30% year-on-year in FY25 to ₹43 crore even as revenue grew only 8% — spending to defend market position rather than a pure input-cost story.

The numbers

All figures as per Ampere’s Registrar of Companies filings, reported by Entrackr in its FY22, FY24 and FY25 coverage. Note the FY23 figure is unusually large relative to the years on either side of it — Entrackr’s own FY24 report flags this as the peak year before the 46% FY24 collapse, and neither the spike nor the collapse is explained in the sourced reporting beyond the scooter-versus-three-wheeler segment split below.

Where the money comes from

• Scooters: ₹432 crore in FY24, or 70.5% of that year’s operating revenue, but down 59% year-on-year — the core consumer product, and the one that fell hardest, per Entrackr.
• Three-wheelers: ₹178 crore in FY24, up 2.5 times year-on-year — the smaller, faster-growing line, tilted toward business and fleet buyers rather than individual commuters, per Entrackr.
• Scrap and residual sales: about ₹2 crore in FY24, a rounding-error line next to the two vehicle segments.
• Non-operating income: ₹29 crore in FY24, layered on top of operating revenue to reach the ₹641 crore total income figure for that year.

The surprise in that split is the direction of travel: the product Ampere was founded to build — affordable personal e-scooters — is the one whose revenue nearly halved in FY24, while the three-wheeler cargo-and-passenger line, a later addition to the portfolio, grew 2.5 times in the same year. A company that started as a consumer-scooter brand is, by revenue mix, drifting toward a commercial-fleet business.

The risks

• Structural unprofitability. Ampere’s EBITDA margin has been negative in every disclosed fiscal year: -4.41% in FY22, -27.46% in FY24 and -30.50% in FY25, per Entrackr’s calculations from RoC filings — four-plus years of a listed parent’s backing have not turned operating margins positive.
• Single-segment concentration. Scooters supplied 70.5% of FY24 operating revenue, and that single segment fell 59% year-on-year in the same period — a demand shock in one product line moves the whole company’s topline, as FY24 demonstrated directly.
• Cash burn against a thinning buffer. Cash and bank balances fell from ₹62 crore at FY24-end to ₹25 crore at FY25-end, even as total expenses rose 7% year-on-year to ₹918 crore in FY25 — a shrinking cash cushion against a still-growing cost base, per Entrackr’s FY25 report.

The takeaway

Ampere’s story complicates a tidy startup narrative. A founder-led company scaled distribution more than tenfold after selling out — from roughly 150 dealers and 35,000 cumulative scooters at the time of its 2018 sale to more than 400 dealerships and 4,00,000-plus units under a listed industrial parent. But the parent’s balance sheet, working-capital lines and dealer network solved a distribution problem, not a margin problem. Four straight disclosed fiscal years of negative EBITDA, and a FY24 in which revenue nearly halved while losses multiplied elevenfold, show that access to capital and channel is necessary for an EV hardware company to survive its early years — but it is not sufficient to make the unit economics work. That re-engineering — of warranty cost, of the scooter-to-three-wheeler mix, of promotional spend relative to growth — has to happen inside the product and the cost stack itself, on a timeline no acquirer’s balance sheet can shortcut.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Ampere Vehicles and when?

Hemalatha Annamalai founded Ampere in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, in 2008, after an idea sparked in 2007 by a conversation about the electric-vehicle transition and a subsequent mobility conference in Geneva, per her profile in The Better India.

Is Ampere still owned by its founder?

No. Greaves Cotton acquired a 67.34% stake in October 2018, raised it to 81.23% in July 2019, and bought Hemalatha Annamalai’s remaining 18.77% in a secondary purchase that closed by November 2019, taking its ownership to 100%, per autoX and Business Standard reporting. Annamalai continued as CEO after the buyout, per Inc42.

What is Ampere’s relationship to Greaves Cotton?

Ampere is a wholly owned brand inside Greaves Electric Mobility, the electric-vehicle subsidiary of listed engine maker Greaves Cotton Limited (NSE: GREAVESCOT, BSE: 501455), per Greaves Cotton’s own disclosed corporate structure.

Is Ampere profitable?

No. It posted a net loss in every fiscal year with disclosed figures from FY22 through FY25 — ₹45.36 crore, ₹20 crore, ₹215 crore (or ₹691.5 crore including one-time costs) and ₹240 crore respectively — with negative EBITDA margins throughout, as per RoC filings reported by Entrackr.

What does Ampere make?

Electric scooters and electric cycles for individual commuters, and electric three-wheelers for cargo and passenger fleet use, sold through more than 400 dealerships in India, per the company’s own website.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Ampere posts Rs 659 Cr revenue in FY25; cuts losses by 65%,” 2025
• Entrackr, “EV maker Ampere’s scale shrinks 46% in FY24; losses multiply 11X,” 2024
• Entrackr, “EV maker Ampere’s gross revenue crosses Rs 500 Cr in FY22,” February 2023
• Inc42, “Ratan Tata Backed EV Company Ampere To Sell Its 67% Stake To Greaves Cotton,” August 2018
• Autocar Professional, “Greaves Cotton to acquire Ampere Vehicles, aims to access new customer base,” August 2018
• autoX, “Greaves Cotton acquires 100% stake in Ampere Vehicles,” 2019
• EQ International Media (eqmagpro.com), “Why engineering major Greaves Cotton is betting big on electric, starting with its Ampere Vehicles buy,” 2019
• The Better India, “Meet this woman innovator who is shattering stereotypes with e-vehicles,” accessed September 2026
• Wikipedia, “Greaves Cotton,” accessed September 2026
• Ampere Electric, “About Ampere,” ampere-electric.com/about, accessed September 2026

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