Bounce spent six years renting out scooters it owned outright, and by January 2020 it was logging 120,000 rides a day across nearly three dozen Indian cities, according to TechCrunch’s report on the company’s $105 million Series D round. Fourteen months later, the same category of filings told a very different story: revenue of just Rs 15 crore for the year ended March 2021, down 83% from Rs 87.5 crore the year before, as reported by Entrackr from the company’s RoC filings.
The company did not fold. It sold off most of a fleet it had spent years building, cut its workforce twice, and turned itself into a manufacturer of the very electric scooters it used to rent out — a pivot chronicled in Inc42’s account of Bounce’s “stalled journey,” now sold under the Bounce Infinity brand. By FY23, revenue had climbed back to Rs 91 crore, six times the prior year, while the net loss narrowed to Rs 197 crore, per Entrackr’s March 2024 report on the company’s filings — proof the rebuild was working, even if profitability still is not.
Quick facts
| Company | Wickedride Adventure Services Private Limited, operating as Bounce / Bounce Infinity |
| Founded | 2014, as luxury bike-rental service Wicked Ride; rebranded Bounce in August 2018 |
| Founder(s) | Vivekananda Hallekere (CEO), Varun Agni, Anil G |
| Businesses | Bounce Infinity electric scooters (manufacture and retail sale), Bounce Daily B2B fleet leasing, battery-swapping network |
| Latest FY revenue | Rs 91 crore, FY23 (year ended March 2023), as per RoC filings reported by Entrackr, March 2024 |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of Rs 197 crore, FY23 (Entrackr, March 2024) |
| Listed | Private; no IPO to date |
| Market value / last valuation | About $450-500 million as of its January 2020 Series D round (TechCrunch, January 2020; Inc42 feature); $238.06 million raised in total across 11 rounds (Inc42 company database, 2026) |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Vivekananda Hallekere (CEO and co-founder); institutional backers include Accel, Sequoia Capital India, B Capital Group and Falcon Edge Capital |
What they do
Bounce today is two businesses stitched onto one brand. Under Bounce Infinity, it designs and assembles low-speed electric scooters that it sells directly to retail buyers through dealerships, competing in the same aisle as Ola Electric, TVS iQube and Bajaj Chetak. Under Bounce Daily, the company leases company-owned two-wheelers — electric and, in smaller numbers, petrol — to delivery riders, gig workers and small businesses on daily or monthly terms, the direct descendant of the dockless rental app that first made the Bounce name. A third, smaller layer is a battery-swapping network, with disclosed infrastructure tie-ups including Bharat Petroleum (300 planned swap stations across 10 cities, per Business Standard) and Park+ (an aim of roughly 3,500 swap locations, per Autocar Professional), aimed at removing the biggest objection to low-speed EVs: charging time.
The origin
Vivekananda Hallekere wanted to ride a Harley-Davidson without buying one. That, as Inc42’s history of the company records, was the idea behind Wicked Ride, the premium motorcycle-rental service he launched in April 2014 with Anil G and Varun Agni, all three coming out of IIM Bangalore. Wicked Ride rented out Harley-Davidsons, Royal Enfields, Triumph Bonnevilles, Kawasaki Ninjas and Ducatis to weekend riders, and by mid-2015 had completed 2,500 rides on the back of a $787,000 (about Rs 5 crore) seed round from angel investors. The founders soon concluded that the bigger, more repeatable market was not weekend leisure but the daily commute: in 2016 they launched Metrobikes, a scooter-sharing service built around first- and last-mile trips to and from Bengaluru’s metro stations, formalised through a February 2018 agreement with the Bengaluru Metro Rail Corporation to station 65-100 bikes at metro stops. In August 2018 the service went fully dockless, using Bluetooth-enabled keyless locks so a scooter could be picked up and dropped anywhere, and the company renamed itself Bounce.
The struggle years
Bounce’s growth in 2018 and 2019 was real: TechCrunch’s coverage of its $72 million Series C in June 2019 put the fleet at 5,000 electric and petrol scooters with two million rides completed, and by the $105 million Series D in January 2020 that had scaled to more than 20,000 vehicles across nearly three dozen cities doing 120,000 rides a day. Then came March 2020. Demand, in the words of the company’s own account carried by Inc42, fell to near-zero as lockdowns emptied the streets Bounce’s 28,000-odd scooters depended on. The company liquidated more than half its fleet at distressed prices — about Rs 20,000 for a used scooter and Rs 30,000 for a used motorcycle — and, per Inc42’s reporting at the time, laid off around 130 employees, roughly a fifth of its staff. It kept a smaller core of the fleet alive by leasing close to 6,000 vehicles to food-delivery firms, e-commerce companies and paramedics who still needed to move during the lockdowns.
The bleeding showed up in the books a year late, because Indian fiscal years lag the calendar. Entrackr’s reporting on the FY21 RoC filings (year ended March 2021) put revenue at Rs 15 crore against Rs 87.5 crore the year before — an 83% collapse — while accumulated losses on the balance sheet had reached Rs 2,152 crore ($224 million at $1 to Rs 96, the rate as of 18 September 2026). Even the year before that had been brutal: FY20’s reported net loss alone was Rs 1,434.6 crore, against revenue of Rs 87.5 crore, a mismatch large enough that a chunk of it likely reflects one-off accounting charges rather than pure cash burn, though Entrackr’s report does not break that out. The retreat continued into 2023: in January that year, per YourStory, Bounce laid off 5% of its remaining staff as part of a further cost-cutting push, even as the EV pivot was already under way.
The turning point
The single event that reset Bounce’s trajectory was the October 2021 acquisition of 22 Motors, an electric-scooter maker, reported by Inc42 as the move that took Bounce from fleet operator to vehicle manufacturer. Before it, Bounce was still fundamentally a rental company that happened to own around 4,000 electric scooters, running roughly 20,000 daily rides across Bengaluru and Vijayawada and having completed more than 400,000 battery swaps, per Inc42’s figures for that period. After it, Bounce built and launched its own vehicle: the Infinity E1, unveiled in December 2021, per TechCrunch’s coverage of the launch, sold directly to retail customers rather than only ridden through an app. The shift in revenue mix over the following two fiscal years tells the same story in numbers — by FY23, 92% of Bounce’s revenue came from selling electric scooters rather than renting anything out, according to Entrackr’s breakdown of the filings.
The money behind it
Bounce has raised $238.06 million across 11 rounds to date, per Inc42’s company database (2026):
- Seed — about $787,000 (roughly Rs 5 crore) from angel investors, July 2015 (Inc42), funding the original Wicked Ride motorcycle-rental launch.
- Series A — reported at roughly $10-12 million, led by Sequoia Capital India and Accel Partners, closing mid-2018 (Inc42), funding the switch to the dockless Bounce scooter model.
- Series C — $72 million at a valuation of over $200 million, led by B Capital and Falcon Edge Capital with Chiratae Ventures, Maverick Ventures, Omidyar Network India, Qualcomm Ventures, Sequoia Capital India and Accel Partners India, June 2019 (TechCrunch) — funded expansion to nearly three dozen cities.
- Series D — $105 million, valuing the company at “a little over $500 million” per TechCrunch’s January 2020 report (Inc42’s separate account of the same round puts it closer to $450 million, roughly 2.2 times the Series C valuation), co-led by B Capital and Accel Partners.
- 2023 bridge — reported talks for $20-30 million from existing investors including Sequoia Capital India, per YourStory (May 2023), which described the raise as coming at a valuation adjusted downward to reflect the shift from mobility app to EV manufacturer.
- 2026 internal round — $5 million from existing investors, reported by YourStory (March 2026), to continue funding the EV manufacturing business through the pandemic-era pivot’s aftermath.
Three backers stand out for what they changed at each stage:
- Sequoia Capital India — backed the 2018 Series A, giving the still-unproven dockless-scooter model institutional credibility before it had scaled beyond Bengaluru, and stayed on as a participant in the 2023 bridge talks.
- B Capital Group — co-led both the 2019 Series C and the 2020 Series D, underwriting the jump from a 5,000-vehicle fleet to more than 20,000 vehicles across nearly three dozen cities.
- Accel Partners — invested from the Series A through the Series D, the one backer present across every major model change the company made, from motorcycle rental to dockless scooters to EV manufacturing.
How it makes money
- Money in: retail sale of Bounce Infinity electric scooters; B2B daily and monthly vehicle leasing under Bounce Daily to delivery and logistics operators; spare parts and software subscriptions; early-stage battery-swap fees.
- FY23 revenue split: electric scooter sales made up 92% of operating revenue, with vehicle rental, spare parts and software subscriptions making up the remainder (Entrackr, March 2024).
- Where the cost sits: procurement of vehicle components alone was Rs 89 crore, or about 30% of FY23’s total expenditure of Rs 297 crore (Entrackr) — the company sources components from China, South Korea and Europe for in-house assembly rather than buying finished electric vehicles wholesale, the approach Inc42 notes rival Vogo takes instead.
- Margin: FY23 EBITDA margin was -142% and return on capital employed was -82% (Entrackr) — still deeply loss-making per rupee of revenue, though a sharp improvement on FY21’s -370% EBITDA margin.
- What people get wrong: Bounce is still widely remembered as the scooter-rental app it started as. By FY23 it earned 92% of its revenue from manufacturing and selling hardware, not from renting anything.
The numbers
Four consecutive years of filings, as reported by Entrackr from RoC data, show revenue collapsing and then partly recovering while losses shrink from an extreme starting point:
| Fiscal year | Revenue (Rs crore) | Net loss (Rs crore) |
| FY20 (year ended March 2020) | 87.5 | 1,434.6 |
| FY21 (year ended March 2021) | 15.0 | 305.6 |
| FY22 (year ended March 2022) | 15.0 | 243.0 |
| FY23 (year ended March 2023) | 91.0 | 197.0 |
The company has not yet published audited FY24 or FY25 filings that this piece could locate. YourStory reported in November 2024, citing CEO Vivekananda Hallekere, that Bounce turned EBIT-positive in September 2024 for the first time and was targeting more than Rs 100 crore in revenue for FY25 — a company-stated forward target, not a filed number, and reported here as such.
Where the money comes from
- Electric scooter sales (Bounce Infinity brand): 92% of FY23 revenue (Entrackr, March 2024).
- Vehicle rental, spare parts and software subscriptions: the remaining 8% of FY23 revenue (Entrackr).
- B2B fleet leasing (Bounce Daily): grew out of the roughly 6,000 vehicles the company leased to delivery, e-commerce and paramedic services during the 2020 lockdowns (Inc42), and continues as a leasing line to logistics operators.
- Battery-swapping infrastructure: disclosed tie-ups with Bharat Petroleum (300 planned stations across 10 cities, Business Standard) and Park+ (up to roughly 3,500 planned swap locations, Autocar Professional); revenue from this layer is not broken out separately in the filings reported on so far.
- Geography: concentrated in India, with the leasing and swapping network most built out in Bengaluru, while retail scooter sales have expanded through dealerships beyond the city following the Infinity E1’s December 2021 launch (TechCrunch).
The surprise is the direction of travel rather than any single number: a company that started as a single-city rental fleet now earns nine rupees in every ten from selling hardware it builds itself, with the original rental business reduced to a minor share of a much smaller top line than the one it had at its 2020 peak.
The risks
- Unit economics still negative: FY23’s expense ratio worked out to Rs 3.26 spent for every Rs 1 of operating revenue, with ROCE at -82% (Entrackr) — the manufacturing pivot has narrowed losses but has not yet made the underlying business self-funding.
- Import-dependent supply chain: Bounce’s self-assembly model sources components from China, South Korea and Europe (Inc42) rather than buying complete vehicles, leaving it exposed to currency swings and import-duty changes in a way an assembler-only rival is not.
- A large accumulated-loss base: Rs 2,152 crore in accumulated losses on the books as of FY21 (Entrackr) means the company needs several years of sustained, not just narrowing, profits before that overhang stops shaping how much external capital it needs to raise, and on what terms — visible already in YourStory’s May 2023 report of a bridge round at an adjusted valuation.
The takeaway
Bounce’s rebuild did not come from cutting its way back to health. Trimming the fleet and the headcount only slowed the bleeding; what changed the trajectory was deciding, in the middle of a demand collapse, to stop being a company that rented vehicles and become one that builds them. That is a harder pivot than a cost cut — it meant taking on a components supply chain, a manufacturing partner in 22 Motors, and a battery-swapping network the company had no reason to own when it was simply an app matching riders to parked scooters. The lesson for any founder staring at a business the market has stopped wanting is not to ask how to survive on less, but whether the business the company should actually be in is a different one from the one it started with.
Frequently asked questions
What does Bounce do now?
Bounce designs, assembles and sells electric scooters under the Bounce Infinity brand, leases vehicles to businesses through Bounce Daily, and runs a smaller battery-swapping network, per Inc42’s account of the company’s current structure.
Is Bounce still the scooter-rental app it started as?
Only partly. By FY23, 92% of its revenue came from selling electric scooters rather than renting them out, according to Entrackr’s breakdown of the company’s filings.
Who founded Bounce and when?
Vivekananda Hallekere, Varun Agni and Anil G founded the company in April 2014 as the motorcycle-rental service Wicked Ride, per Inc42’s history of the company; it was renamed Bounce in August 2018.
Has Bounce turned a profit?
Not on a full-year, audited basis through FY23, when it reported a net loss of Rs 197 crore on revenue of Rs 91 crore, per Entrackr (March 2024). YourStory reported in November 2024 that the company said it had turned EBIT-positive for a single month, September 2024.
What is Bounce’s valuation and is it a unicorn?
No. Its highest disclosed valuation came with its January 2020 Series D round, reported at “a little over $500 million” by TechCrunch and at roughly $450 million by Inc42 — well short of the $1 billion unicorn threshold, and the company has not disclosed a higher valuation since.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Entrackr, March 2024 — “Bounce’s revenue surges 6X to Rs 91 Cr in FY23; cuts losses”
- Entrackr, February 2022 — “Bounce shrinks 83% in FY21, Rs 2,152 Cr losses ride pillion”
- Inc42, feature — “Of pivots, calibration and a new road map: how Bounce is resurrecting its stalled journey”
- Inc42 company database, 2026 — Bounce company profile (total funding, headcount, last round date)
- Inc42, buzz report — “Bounce lays off 130 employees as Covid-19 impact hits mobility startup”
- TechCrunch, 17 June 2019 — “Bounce raises $72 million” (Series C)
- TechCrunch, 22 January 2020 — “Indian bike rental startup Bounce raises $105M” (Series D)
- TechCrunch, 2 December 2021 — coverage of the Bounce Infinity E1 launch
- Forbes India, EV Special 2021 — “From scooter rental to EV player: how Bounce morphed to survive the pandemic”
- YourStory, January 2023 — “Mobility firm Bounce lays off 5% of staff to cut costs”
- YourStory, May 2023 — “Exclusive: Bounce to close new $20M funding round”
- YourStory, November 2024 — “Bounce turns EBIT positive in September, to double down on B2B”
- YourStory, March 2026 — “Bounce raises $5M from existing investors as EV mobility startup”
- Business Standard, May 2022 — “Bounce Infinity ties up with BPCL to set up battery swapping infrastructure”
- Autocar Professional — “Bounce partners Park+ to set up battery swapping network across 3,500 locations”
- Zaubacorp / Tracxn corporate records — Wickedride Adventure Services Private Limited, CIN U74140KA2014PTC076210
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