Ather Energy spent five years building its first scooter before it sold a single unit, and it has not closed a full financial year in the black since. It lost ₹517 crore in the year ended March 2026 alone. Yet its stock has climbed roughly 130 percent in 2026, a rally Bloomberg says has outpaced Tesla and BYD, pushing its market value to about ₹64,000 crore (around $6.7 billion, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) by mid-September 2026.
That gap — a company still bleeding cash, priced by the market as if it has already won — is the story of Ather Energy. It is a bet that in India’s two-wheeler market, being early and being right about the product matters more than being profitable on schedule. Whether that bet is vindicated is still being decided in showrooms every month, as Bajaj and TVS claw back share Ather once had to itself.
Quick facts
| Company | Ather Energy Limited |
| Founded | 2013, Bengaluru |
| Founder(s) | Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain, both IIT Madras graduates |
| Businesses | Electric scooters (450 series, Rizta family scooter), Ather Grid public charging network, connected-vehicle software |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹3,823 crore total income, FY26 (year ended March 2026), up 66 percent year on year |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹517 crore, FY26, narrowed from ₹812.3 crore in FY25 |
| Listed | 6 May 2025, NSE and BSE |
| Market value | Approximately ₹62,000-65,000 crore as of mid-September 2026 |
| Key shareholders | Hero MotoCorp is the largest shareholder with a reported stake in the mid-to-high thirties percent; founders Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain; GIC and NIIF among institutional backers |
What they do
Ather Energy designs, manufactures and sells electric scooters in India, running two product lines out of its own factories in Hosur, Tamil Nadu: the performance-oriented 450 series and the Rizta, a family-focused scooter launched to chase volume rather than margin. It sells directly to retail buyers through company-run “experience centres” — 700 of them by the end of FY26, doubled from 351 a year earlier — rather than the dealer-franchise model most petrol two-wheeler makers use. Alongside the vehicles, Ather runs Ather Grid, a public fast-charging network, and builds its own vehicle software and battery packs in-house, treating the scooter as a connected device rather than a mechanical one bolted onto a battery.
The origin
Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain met as engineering-design students at IIT Madras and kept circling the same conversation: that electric vehicles were inevitable in India, and that the technology holding them back was the battery. Mehta briefly took a job as a deputy manager at Ashok Leyland after graduating, then quit within six months, in 2013, to work on the problem full time with Jain, using a hostel room and a grant from IIT Madras and the government’s Technology Development Board to get started. The insight that actually built the company was less tidy than “fix the battery”: once they started, they found the motor, the frame, the software and the charging infrastructure all needed reinventing at the same time, because none of the parts a scooter needs already existed for electric power.
The struggle years
Ather unveiled a working prototype, the S340, in February 2016, aiming for production by the end of that year. It missed that date by nearly two years — the company has said plainly that it underestimated both the engineering challenge and the difficulty of building a team for a market that had no appetite yet for electric two-wheelers. The bigger crisis was pricing, not engineering. Ather’s original plan was to launch at around ₹75,000, matching petrol scooters. A prospective US investor rejected the company over exactly this plan, warning that underpriced electric-vehicle start-ups “flame up and die” because they can never fund the differentiation their product needs. Ather spent months absorbing that rejection before repositioning entirely upmarket. The Ather 450 finally launched in Bengaluru in September 2018 — five years after the company was founded, and five years in which it had shipped nothing and earned no revenue.
The turning point
The 450 launched at roughly ₹1,65,000, more than double the originally planned price, offset in part by a government subsidy of about ₹60,000 available at the time. Founder Tarun Mehta has described the stakes in stark terms: if the premium positioning failed to produce visible differentiation, the company would be dead on arrival, because there was no cheaper fallback business to retreat to. It did not fail. That single pricing decision — choosing to lose money more slowly at a high price rather than lose money faster at a low one — is the decision the rest of Ather’s history sits on, including the Rizta launch years later that finally gave it volume without abandoning the margin discipline the 450 forced onto the business.
The money behind it
Ather has raised roughly $500-550 million in private capital across nineteen-plus rounds before its IPO, according to Tracxn and CB Insights. Hero MotoCorp has been the most consistent backer: it first invested ₹180 crore (about $19 million) in Ather’s Series B in October 2016, added roughly ₹130 crore in 2018, and kept participating in every major round since, becoming Ather’s largest shareholder with a reported stake that entrackr placed at close to 33 percent around the 2023 rights issue and other reporting has since put nearer 40 percent. Tiger Global was the earliest institutional investor, entering in the Series A in March 2015, and exited in November 2025, selling its remaining stake for a reported ₹1,204 crore (Business Standard). GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, joined in a Series E round in September 2023 and, together with Hero MotoCorp, backed a ₹900 crore rights issue that year. In January 2022, Ather raised $128 million from Hero MotoCorp and the government-backed National Investment and Infrastructure Fund; two and a half years later, in August 2024, a further $71 million from NIIF pushed Ather’s valuation to a reported $1.3 billion, making it a unicorn just months before it filed its draft IPO papers.
How it makes money
Ather earns almost all its revenue from selling scooters outright to retail customers, plus accessories and paid software add-ons such as its “Propack” feature bundle, sold on top of the vehicle. The part people get wrong is treating this as a simple hardware margin business: Ather builds its own battery packs and motor controllers in-house at its Hosur plants rather than buying them in, which raises capital intensity but is also where the company says its long-run gross margin has to come from, since electric drivetrains have far fewer moving parts to mark up than a petrol engine. The trade-off shows up directly in the numbers — revenue per scooter fell from ₹143,333 in FY24 to ₹128,295 in FY25, a drop of 12 percent, because the cheaper, higher-volume Rizta earns less per unit than the 450 series even after software upsells, according to Ather’s own disclosures reported by Angel One. Adjusted gross margin has nonetheless been improving as volume scales: it reached ₹925 crore in FY26, 24 percent of total income and more than double the prior year in absolute terms.
The numbers
| Year | Revenue / total income (₹ crore) | Net loss (₹ crore) |
| FY23 (year ended March 2023) | 1,784 | 864.5 |
| FY24 (year ended March 2024) | 1,753.8 | 1,059.7 |
| FY25 (year ended March 2025) | 2,255 | 812.3 |
| FY26 (year ended March 2026) | 3,823 | 517 |
Losses have not fallen in a straight line — FY24 was actually Ather’s worst year for both flat revenue and a widening loss — but FY25 and FY26 show a company converting scale into narrower losses for the first time: revenue nearly doubled between FY25 and FY26 while the net loss less than fell in half, and EBITDA loss shrank from ₹531 crore to ₹257 crore over the same year, according to figures reported by Autocar Professional.
Where the money comes from
The surprise inside Ather’s growth is which scooter is actually selling it. The Rizta, positioned as a practical family scooter and priced below the 450 series, accounted for 57 percent of Ather’s 155,394 units sold in FY25 and climbed to 76 percent of a record 262,942 units in FY26 — meaning the bulk of Ather’s unit growth now comes from its cheaper product, not its flagship. Geographically, Ather remains a South India-led business: in the fourth quarter of FY26 its market share in South India was 23.5 percent against 12.1 percent in the rest of the country, a split that shows how much of its national growth still has to come from markets outside its home base.
The risks
First, subsidy exposure: Ather’s DRHP-linked disclosures, summarised by Yes Securities, flag that cuts to the FAME-II subsidy scheme squeeze margins directly, since a meaningful part of the affordability case for its scooters has historically rested on government incentives that can be withdrawn or reduced with little notice. Second, concentrated backing: Hero MotoCorp’s large and rising shareholding has been central to Ather’s survival through multiple funding rounds, but it also means Ather’s capital access and strategic room to manoeuvre are unusually tied to one shareholder’s continued support. Third, and most visible in the market-share data, intensifying competition: Bajaj’s share of India’s electric two-wheeler market doubled from 11.2 percent to 22.4 percent in the year to August 2026, overtaking Ather for second place, while TVS has led the category throughout; Ather has had to defend its position with volume from a lower-margin product rather than from its premium line.
The takeaway
Ather’s history argues that in a genuinely new product category, the riskiest move is pricing for today’s market rather than the product you are actually building — the company nearly died taking cheap-scooter money before it existed, and was arguably saved by a rejection that forced it to price for the differentiation it eventually earned. The harder lesson sitting underneath the stock’s 2026 rally is that being right about pricing does not make the business easy afterwards: eight years after that repositioning, Ather is still not profitable, and its most successful product by volume is also its lowest-margin one.
Frequently asked questions
Is Ather Energy profitable?
No. Ather posted a net loss of ₹517 crore in FY26 (year ended March 2026), its fourth consecutive year of losses, though the loss has narrowed from ₹1,059.7 crore in FY24 as revenue has grown, according to company results reported by Autocar Professional.
Who owns Ather Energy?
Hero MotoCorp is Ather’s largest shareholder, with a stake reported at close to a third around 2023 and closer to 40 percent in more recent reporting, alongside founders Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain and institutional investors including GIC and the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund.
When did Ather Energy list, and at what price?
Ather listed on the NSE and BSE on 6 May 2025 at an IPO price of ₹321 per share, the top of its ₹304-321 price band, and debuted at ₹326.05, a premium of 1.57 percent to the issue price.
Is Ather Energy the largest electric scooter maker in India?
No. Ather ranked third in India’s electric two-wheeler market in August 2026 with a 15.7 percent share, behind TVS (26.7 percent) and Bajaj (22.4 percent), though it has consistently outsold Ola Electric, whose share fell to about 7.6-6.8 percent over the same period, according to data reported by Autopunditz and Inc42.
What is Ather Grid?
Ather Grid is the company’s public fast-charging network for electric two-wheelers, which had grown to more than 5,000 chargers across 395 cities by January 2026, roughly 3,675 of them operated directly by Ather and the rest through partner networks.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
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- Inc42, “Hero MotoCorp Backed Ather Energy’s Loss Shoots Up 2.5X To INR 865 Cr In FY23”, September 2023
- The Arc, “FY24: Ather Energy’s losses widen to Rs 1,059 cr”, 2024
- Business Standard, “Ather Energy Q4 results: loss narrows to Rs 234.4 crore on higher revenue”, May 2025
- The Machine Maker, “Ather Energy Reports ₹812.3 Crore Loss in FY25 Amid Strong Revenue Growth”, 2025
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- Autocar Professional, “Record 1.28 Million e-2Ws Sold in CY2025, TVS, Bajaj, Ather and Hero Clock Best-Ever Retails”, 2026
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- Angel One, “Ather Energy Sees Revenue Per Scooter Dip as Rizta Boosts Sales”, 2025
- Autocar Professional, “Ather Rizta Crosses 300,000 Sales, Commands 76% Share of EV Startup’s Portfolio in FY2026”, 2026
- Autocar Professional, “Ather Energy expands charging network to over 5,000 fast chargers across India”, January 2026
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- iitmfoundation.org, “Tarun Mehta & Swapnil Jain: Electrifying scooters”, 2018
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