Startup Deep Dive : Baaz Bikes — revenue grew 279% in FY25 but losses grew faster

Baaz Bikes wants to erase the one cost that keeps a Delhi delivery rider off an electric scooter: the scooter itself. It rents them one on subscription instead, along with a network that swaps a drained battery for a full one in under 90 seconds. The idea worked well enough that revenue for the year ended March 2025 rose 279.1% to ₹20.1 crore (about $2.1 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0), up from ₹5.3 crore a year earlier (Inc42, financial filings dated 2025).

The problem is what it cost to get there. Total expenses rose 218% over the same year, and the net loss nearly tripled to ₹24.5 crore — a single year’s loss bigger than the entire ₹19.08 crore the company had raised just months earlier in its most recent funding round (Inc42; Entrackr, July 2025). Five funding rounds, roughly $12 million raised, and seven years after four IIT Delhi engineers built their first scooter for gig workers, Baaz Bikes is still proving whether a subscription-and-swap model can outrun its own burn rate.

Quick facts

What they do

Baaz Bikes builds and operates a subscription electric-scooter fleet for the riders who deliver India’s food, groceries and parcels — the people working for Zomato, Zepto, Swiggy and Amazon rather than for Baaz itself (Inc42, November 2023; emobilityplus.com, November 2023). Instead of asking a rider to save up for a vehicle or take on a loan, Baaz rents them a purpose-built low-speed e-scooter for a monthly fee reported at around ₹5,000 (emobilityplus.com, November 2023, citing the company), bundled with access to its own battery-swapping network so the rider never has to sit and wait for a charge. The company also sells a version of its scooter outright at a ₹35,000 ex-showroom Delhi price, battery excluded, according to its own website — though through late 2023 its public guidance still described outright ownership as a plan for the future rather than a live option, meaning subscription remains the model’s verified backbone. The three pieces of the stack carry their own brand names: the “Baaz” scooter, the “Baaz Swap” battery-swapping network built on “Energy Pods” (1kWh swappable lithium-ion packs), and the “Baazigar” app riders use to find a station (baaz.bike; indianweb2.com, October 2022).

The origin

The founders did not come to electric two-wheelers through the auto industry; they came to it through motorsport. Anubhav Sharma, Shubham Srivastava, Karan Singla, Abhijeet Saxena and Sahil Malik met at IIT Delhi while building race cars together for Axlr8r Formula Racing, the institute’s student automobile club, where they picked up the hands-on vehicle-engineering skills that would later go into the Baaz scooter (iit-techambit.in, IIT Delhi TechAmbit profile). The insight that turned that skill set into a company was about India’s gig economy rather than about vehicles: as online food and grocery delivery expanded after 2019, the riders doing the actual deliveries were left to absorb two costs nobody else in the chain carried — the upfront price of a vehicle they often could not afford outright, and a fuel bill that ate directly into take-home pay. Layered on top was the environmental cost of putting more fossil-fuel two-wheelers on the road to serve that demand.

Sharma has summarised the founders’ conviction plainly: “EVs are going to dominate the automobile sector in the future, and it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when” (iit-techambit.in). The company took its name, Baaz — Hindi for hawk — deliberately, to push back on a common assumption in the two-wheeler trade that electric vehicles were too fragile for the punishing, all-day mileage gig riders put on a bike; a hawk, the founders reasoned, is nobody’s idea of a delicate machine.

The struggle years

Baaz’s early capital history reads like a company that took time to convince outside money it had something durable. It raised an undisclosed seed amount from AdvantEdge Founders on 23 February 2020, then had to go back to the same investor a year later for a second, $300,000 seed cheque on 13 April 2021, before a proper institutional round — a $2 million Pre-Series A led by Kalaari Capital — finally closed on 25 February 2022 (Inc42 funding data). Two years and two separate seed-stage cheques stand between Baaz’s first funding and its first real institutional validation, a slower path than most venture-backed EV startups take to their Series A.

The financial strain did not end once bigger money arrived. In FY24 (the year ended March 2024) — the year the company was still building toward its Series A pitch — Baaz reported revenue from operations of ₹3.76 crore against a net loss of ₹8.47 crore, spending well over double what it earned even before its major post-funding expansion push (Entrackr, citing the company’s RoC filing; Inc42’s own data aggregation separately lists FY24 total revenue at ₹5.3 crore, a difference likely explained by other income sitting outside operating revenue). The pattern did not reverse with scale: in FY25, even as revenue grew 279.1% to ₹20.1 crore, expenses grew faster still — up 218% to ₹43.8 crore — and the net loss nearly tripled to ₹24.5 crore (Inc42, financial filings).

Execution also ran behind the company’s own public timeline. Right after its November 2023 Series A, Baaz’s leadership guided to scaling from roughly 500 operational scooters and 30-35 battery-swap stations, confined to South Delhi, up to 6,000-7,000 e-scooters and 300 stations across the wider National Capital Region within eight months — by around July 2024 (emobilityplus.com, November 2023). Thirteen months after that guidance, in December 2024, Baaz’s newly announced infrastructure tie-up with Tata Power-DDL was still adding battery-swap stations three at a time, starting with three grid substations in Rohini (Business Standard; Inc42 buzz; psuwatch.com, December 2024 reporting). Only by the company’s current LinkedIn profile — reviewed in September 2026 — does the fleet approach the scale once promised for mid-2024: roughly 6,000 vehicles and more than 350 automated swap stations, a target effectively reached about two years later than originally guided.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point is the Series A that closed on 20 November 2023: $8 million led by Singapore’s BIG Capital, with participation from Rakuten Capital — the venture arm of Japan’s Rakuten Group, marking a rare cross-border strategic name in an India gig-EV round — alongside existing backers Kalaari Capital and 9Unicorns, and ReNew Power chairman Sumant Sinha investing personally (Inc42 funding data; emobilityplus.com, November 2023). Before that round, Baaz was a South Delhi-only operation running roughly 500 scooters through about 30-35 swap stations. The capital was explicitly earmarked to change that: leadership set out plans to expand across Delhi, Gurugram and Noida, multiply the fleet more than tenfold to 6,000-7,000 scooters, take the swap network to 300 stations, and open a new bike-taxi line within six to seven months (emobilityplus.com, November 2023). BIG Capital’s own reasoning, as its CFO put it publicly, was that EV adoption in India “can only be done in a closed loop environment given the constraints of charging infrastructure” — in other words, a subscription fleet with its own captive swap network could adopt EVs faster than the open retail market, which is the exact bet the Series A capital was placed on.

The money behind it

Baaz has raised money in five identifiable rounds since 2020, moving from small, insider-heavy seed cheques to a real institutional Series A and then back to a smaller, existing-investor-only extension:

• Seed, 23 February 2020: undisclosed amount from AdvantEdge Founders (Inc42 funding data).
• Seed extension, 13 April 2021: $300,000 from AdvantEdge Founders and two other investors (Inc42 funding data).
• Pre-Series A, 25 February 2022: $2 million, led by Kalaari Capital with four other participants (Inc42 funding data).
• Series A, 20 November 2023: $8 million, led by BIG Capital (Singapore), with Rakuten Capital, Kalaari Capital, 9Unicorns and Sumant Sinha participating (Inc42; emobilityplus.com).
• Extended Series A, 29-30 July 2025: ₹19.08 crore (about $2.2 million), raised entirely from existing backers — Big Capital contributed ₹8.36 crore and led the round, Rakuten Capital put in ₹5.86 crore, Kalaari Capital added ₹4.35 crore, and Big Capital’s own CFO, Preetinder Singh Panjrath, invested a personal ₹50 lakh; no new institutional investor joined (Entrackr; TheKredible).
• Total raised: about $10.3 million across the first four rounds as of the November 2023 Series A (Inc42); roughly $12 million cumulative once the July 2025 extension is included (TheKredible).

What each backer changed: AdvantEdge Founders supplied the earliest conviction, backing Baaz twice at the seed stage before any other institutional name would; Kalaari Capital stepped in to lead the Pre-Series A in February 2022 and has stayed in every round since, emerging as the largest single outside shareholder at roughly 24.8% by mid-2025; BIG Capital’s Series A lead in November 2023 was the round that funded the NCR-wide expansion push, and it returned to lead the July 2025 extension as well; Rakuten Capital brought a large cross-border strategic name to an India gig-EV story; and Sumant Sinha’s personal participation lent renewable-energy-sector credibility to a company betting on EV adoption. The July 2025 round’s shape — three existing backers and one individual’s personal cheque, with no new lead — is itself a signal about where Baaz stood with new investors at that point, discussed further under risks below.

How it makes money

• Subscription fees: the primary disclosed revenue line — gig riders pay a recurring fee, reported at around ₹5,000 a month per scooter as of November 2023, for access to a Baaz e-scooter (emobilityplus.com, November 2023, citing the company).
• Battery-swap access: bundled into the subscription rather than sold as a separate published fee; the swap network (Baaz Swap, Energy Pods, sub-90-second swaps via the Baazigar app) is the infrastructure that makes the subscription usable all day without a charging stop (baaz.bike; indianweb2.com, October 2022).
• Outright vehicle sale: a ₹35,000 ex-showroom scooter, battery excluded, is listed on the company’s own site, but as of the company’s most recent public product guidance (November 2023) ownership models were still described as a forthcoming addition rather than a live revenue line — so subscription income is the verified core of the business today.
• Infrastructure partnerships, not a revenue line: the December 2024 tie-up with Tata Power-DDL gives Baaz space at grid substations to install swap stations in exchange for Baaz designing, installing and maintaining them — an asset-light way to grow station count without buying land, though no revenue-sharing terms were disclosed (Business Standard; Inc42 buzz, December 2024).
• Where the margin was supposed to sit: a subscription-plus-swap model is meant to earn its margin from utilisation — keeping a scooter and its batteries in near-constant use across multiple riders or shifts, rather than from a one-time sale margin, since the ₹35,000 sticker price is closer to a hardware cost than a profit centre.
• What people get wrong: it is easy to assume Baaz earns like a vehicle retailer selling scooters at a markup. On the public record, it does not — its FY25 accounts show total expenses of ₹43.8 crore against revenue of ₹20.1 crore, meaning the company currently spends more than double what it collects from riders and any other income combined (Inc42, financial filings), consistent with a business still paying to build out fleet and station density ahead of the recurring income that density is meant to eventually support.

The numbers

Baaz Bikes is a private company whose detailed rupee-denominated financials have been reported for two fiscal years only. FY22 and FY23 figures were not located in any of the RoC-filing aggregators checked this session, and FY26 has not yet been filed; rather than estimate them, they are left out below.

• FY24 revenue: ₹3.76 crore from operations (Entrackr, citing the company’s RoC filing); Inc42’s separate data aggregation lists ₹5.3 crore in total FY24 revenue, a gap likely reflecting non-operating or other income folded into the larger figure.
• FY24 net loss: ₹8.47 crore — more than double that year’s operating revenue (Entrackr).
• FY25 revenue: ₹20.1 crore, up 279.1% year-on-year against Inc42’s own FY24 base of ₹5.3 crore (Inc42, financial filings).
• FY25 total expenses: ₹43.8 crore, up 218% year-on-year (Inc42).
• FY25 net loss: ₹24.5 crore, meaning losses grew faster in percentage terms than the expense base itself and far outpaced revenue growth in absolute rupee terms (Inc42).

Where the money comes from

• Business-line split: subscription access to the Baaz e-scooter fleet is the verified core revenue line; the Baaz Swap network is bundled into that subscription rather than billed separately in any published breakdown, and outright ownership sales remain a stated future addition rather than a disclosed current line (emobilityplus.com, November 2023; baaz.bike).
• Customer concentration: named riders come from a small set of platforms — Zomato, Zepto, Swiggy and Amazon are the delivery employers repeatedly cited across coverage — meaning Baaz’s demand is indirectly gatekept by a handful of aggregators it has no direct commercial contract with (Inc42; emobilityplus.com, November 2023).
• Geography: every disclosed metric — the original South Delhi base, the Gurugram and Noida expansion guided in November 2023, and the current registered addresses in New Delhi’s Saket and Gurugram’s Udyog Vihar plus a service facility at IMT Manesar — sits inside the Delhi National Capital Region; no source found this session places Baaz vehicles or stations outside NCR (baaz.bike; LinkedIn company profile).
• The surprise: despite five funding rounds, cross-border investors and seven years of operating history, Baaz’s entire disclosed footprint — by its own September 2026 LinkedIn profile, roughly 6,000 vehicles and 350-plus swap stations — remains confined to one metro region, unlike some battery-swap rivals that have expanded across multiple Indian cities in the same period.

The risks

• Concentrated dependence on a handful of delivery platforms: Baaz’s riders work for Zomato, Zepto, Swiggy and Amazon, but Baaz has no direct commercial relationship with those platforms disclosed in the public record — it simply serves the riders those platforms employ or contract. If any major platform shifts its own fleet strategy, such as sponsoring in-house EV leasing for riders, or cuts rider payouts in a way that squeezes what a rider can afford to pay Baaz monthly, subscriber demand could move for reasons entirely outside Baaz’s control (Inc42; emobilityplus.com, November 2023).
• Cash burn that already exceeds a full funding round: Baaz’s FY25 net loss of ₹24.5 crore was larger than the entire ₹19.08 crore it raised in its July 2025 extension, and that extension came solely from three existing investors plus one individual’s personal cheque rather than a new institutional lead (Inc42; Entrackr). A company burning more in a year than a single funding round replenishes needs either faster revenue growth, a larger new round, or both, and the narrowing circle of backers in the most recent round is a visible sign of how that search was going as of mid-2025.
• Infrastructure rollout lagging fleet ambition: the entire subscription pitch depends on riders never having to wait long for a battery swap, which requires station density to keep pace with fleet size. Baaz’s own November 2023 target of 300 stations within eight months was still showing single-digit station additions per partnership announcement thirteen months later in December 2024, and only reached the originally guided scale around two years behind schedule per the company’s current LinkedIn profile — a pattern that, if it repeats as the company chases its next scale target, risks degrading the swap experience that differentiates it from a plain vehicle-leasing business (Business Standard; Inc42 buzz, December 2024; LinkedIn company profile).

The takeaway

Baaz Bikes solved a real affordability problem for gig-delivery riders by moving the cost of owning an EV off their books and onto its own. That is a genuinely useful thing to build, and the subscription-and-swap model is not a gimmick — it is the only structure that lets a low-speed electric scooter compete with a petrol bike on total cost per delivery. But removing a cost from the customer does not delete it; it relocates it, and Baaz’s own numbers show exactly where it landed. Revenue growing 279% in a single year sounds like the story of a company finding product-market fit, until it sits next to expenses growing 218% and a loss nearly tripling in the same twelve months. A subscription-and-infrastructure business has to win the race between fleet-and-station density, which costs money now, and recurring rider revenue, which arrives slowly and only after that density exists. Baaz’s own timeline — an eight-month station target that took roughly two years, and a follow-on round funded entirely by the same three investors who were already in — suggests that race is still open. The transferable lesson for any founder building a subscription model around someone else’s affordability problem: taking on your customer’s capital cost also means taking on their financing risk, and the timeline you promise investors for building out the infrastructure to support it will very likely be the promise that slips first.

Frequently asked questions

What does Baaz Bikes do?

Baaz Bikes rents subscription electric scooters to gig-delivery riders working for platforms such as Zomato, Zepto, Swiggy and Amazon, bundled with access to its own automated battery-swapping network, Baaz Swap, so riders can swap a depleted battery for a full one in under 90 seconds rather than waiting to charge.

Who founded Baaz Bikes and when?

Baaz Bikes was founded in 2019 by five IIT Delhi alumni — Anubhav Sharma, Shubham Srivastava, Karan Singla, Abhijeet Saxena and Sahil Malik — who met building race cars together for the institute’s Axlr8r Formula Racing club before turning to electric two-wheelers for gig workers.

How much funding has Baaz Bikes raised, and who are its investors?

Baaz Bikes has raised about $12 million cumulatively across five rounds since 2020, according to TheKredible. The largest was an $8 million Series A in November 2023 led by Singapore’s BIG Capital with Rakuten Capital, Kalaari Capital, 9Unicorns and Sumant Sinha, followed by a ₹19.08 crore extended Series A in July 2025 funded entirely by existing backers Big Capital, Rakuten Capital and Kalaari Capital.

Is Baaz Bikes profitable?

No. Baaz Bikes reported a net loss of ₹24.5 crore in FY25 (year ended March 2025) against revenue of ₹20.1 crore, with the loss nearly tripling year-on-year even as revenue grew 279.1%, according to Inc42’s data aggregation of the company’s financial filings.

What is Baaz Bikes worth?

Baaz Bikes was valued at a post-money figure of about ₹278 crore (roughly $32.29 million) after its July 2025 extended Series A, according to Entrackr and TheKredible. Inc42 separately reported a $30.49 million valuation shortly after the company’s original Series A closed in November 2023.

Sources

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

• Inc42, company profile page for Baaz Bikes, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, funding data page for Baaz Bikes, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, financials page for Baaz Bikes, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “EV Startup Baaz Bikes Raises $8 Mn To Bolster Escooter Offerings For Gig Workers,” November 2023
• Inc42, “Baaz Partners Tata Power To Set Up Battery Swapping Stations,” December 2024
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Baaz Bikes to raise fresh funds from existing investors,” 2025
• TheKredible, financials and shareholding summary for Baaz Bikes, accessed September 2026
• emobilityplus.com, “Baaz Bikes Secures $8 Million Funding Led By Big Capital,” 23 November 2023
• Business Standard, “Tata DDL partners with Baaz Bikes to set up EV battery swapping stations,” December 2024
• indianweb2.com, “IIT-Delhi Alumni Founded Baaz Launches ‘Made-in-India’ Smart-Rugged e-Scooters and EV Ecosystem for Gig Delivery Riders,” October 2022
• iit-techambit.in, “Baaz Bikes: A Hawk in the EV Mobility Space,” IIT Delhi TechAmbit, accessed September 2026
• baaz.bike, company website, accessed September 2026
• LinkedIn, Baaz Bikes company profile, accessed September 2026

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