Startup Deep Dive : ChargeZone — how India’s largest EV charging network still loses money

ChargeZone calls itself India’s largest electric-vehicle charging network, a claim built on interoperability deals that put 13,500 charging stations within reach of its app — even though the Vadodara-based company itself owns only a slice of that number. The rest belongs to rivals it has agreed to share traffic with, including Statiq and Bolt, the very firms it also competes against for highway real estate and OEM contracts.

Its own books tell a smaller, more ordinary story: revenue of ₹54.8 crore (approximately $5.7 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) in the year to March 2024, up 15.0% from ₹47.6 crore a year earlier, alongside a net loss of ₹7.9 crore, as per financial filings aggregated by Inc42. Eight years after two engineers with a solar-EPC background decided that charging infrastructure had to arrive before Indian EV adoption did, ChargeZone is still working out whether owning the wires or owning the network is the better business.

Quick facts

What they do

ChargeZone builds, owns and operates electric-vehicle charging stations across India, and increasingly sells access to a wider network it does not own outright. Its physical footprint spans AC chargers (3.3 kW, 7.4 kW and 10 kW) for slow overnight charging and DC fast chargers (30 kW to 360 kW, and up to 1.5 MW at newer highway sites) that can take a compatible car to 80% charge in about 30 minutes, as reported by Autocar Professional in April 2025. Customers range from individual EV owners charging through its app to fleet operators running e-buses and e-trucks, and to original equipment manufacturers — Hyundai, Mahindra & Mahindra, Tata Motors, Volvo Eicher and Ashok Leyland are named as partners, as per Entrepreneur India’s May 2024 report on the company. Underneath the hardware sits ChargeCloud, ChargeZone’s own software layer for network monitoring, tariff management and, since 2025, interoperability with rival charging networks.

The origin

Kartikey Hariyani was not new to power infrastructure when he set up ChargeZone in 2018. He had spent time at Larsen & Toubro in the late 1990s and early 2000s, then ran TecSo Projects Limited from 2010, building solar photovoltaic plants, according to profile details aggregated by YourStory and Inc42. Pavan Bakeri joined him as co-founder and director. The insight they carried over from the solar business was less about vehicles and more about sequencing: in a market where electric vehicles were still a rounding error on Indian roads, Hariyani has said publicly that “the EV charging infrastructure comes first, followed by the adoption of EVs” — a bet that supply would have to lead demand, not follow it, as he told S&P Global’s Autotech Insight. That conviction is why a solar-EPC founder ended up in EV charging: he treated a charging station the same way he had treated a solar plant, as a piece of power infrastructure to be financed, engineered and operated at scale before the market obviously justified it.

The struggle years

Building ahead of demand meant building in places the Indian grid was not ready for. By the mid-2020s ChargeZone had run into a recurring problem at its highway sites: unreliable or delayed grid connections in exactly the remote corridor locations its expansion plan depended on. Its response was not cosmetic. The company deployed battery energy storage systems at seven highway locations to buffer against grid dependency, and committed roughly ₹10 crore to build what Hariyani described as India’s first fully off-grid solar-and-BESS-powered EV charging hub in Gujarat — a 1.8 MW solar array paired with 3 MW of battery storage, sized to service around 50 electric trucks a day, as reported by S&P Global’s Autotech Insight. That is an expensive way to solve a connectivity problem, and it says something about how far the public grid still lagged the company’s own rollout ambitions.

The second pivot was about capital structure, not power. Having raised money in stages since a 2019 angel round and a 2020 pre-Series A, ChargeZone found that owning every charger it needed to reach national scale was not going to be affordable on its own balance sheet. Two changes followed. In April 2025 it struck OCPI-based roaming agreements with seven competing networks — Statiq, Bolt, Kazam, Pulse Energy, Chargemod, ElectreeFi and Evnnovator — turning direct rivals into interoperability partners so its app could reach 13,500 stations nationwide without ChargeZone having to build or finance most of them, as reported by Autocar Professional and the Free Press Journal. Then in 2026 it went further, launching a Dealer-Owned, Company-Operated franchise model for highway supercharging stations, in which outside investors put up a minimum ₹1 crore per station and ChargeZone handles development and operations, with State Bank of India offering EV Mitra loans of ₹10 lakh to ₹10 crore to franchisees, as per electrive.com’s April 2026 report. Both moves point the same way: a company that started out wanting to own the entire charging stack concluded it could not fund national scale that way, and pushed capital risk onto partners and franchisees instead.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after moment is 24 April 2025, when ChargeZone announced it had become India’s largest EV charging network — not by adding its own stations fast enough, but by wiring its app into rivals’ networks. Before that date, ChargeZone’s own operated footprint stood at roughly 3,200 charging points across more than 400 locations in India and the UAE, the scale it had when British International Investment committed $19 million to it in April 2024, as per Entrepreneur India. After the OCPI roaming tie-up went live, a ChargeZone user could reach 13,500 charging stations network-wide, and the company said nearly 70% of India’s electric car owners had used its platform at some point, according to matching reports from Autocar Professional and the Free Press Journal, both dated 24 April 2025. The number of chargers ChargeZone physically owned did not quadruple overnight. What changed was the definition of the network — and the marketing claim it could now legitimately make.

The money behind it

• Sept 2019: angel round, amount undisclosed — first institutional capital into the company, per Tracxn’s funding timeline.
• Nov 2020: pre-Series A round, amount undisclosed — reported by YourStory as the company’s first named funding-alert round.
• March 2023: Series A1, $54 million (including an $8 million debt component), led by BlueOrchard Finance — used to fund an immediate rollout of 286 charging stations serving 1,130 e-buses and e-trucks and more than 1,250 e-car fleets, and expected to support around 500 jobs directly and indirectly, as per Autocar Professional and EVreporter, both March 2023.
• 2023: Macquarie Capital took an undisclosed minority stake, part of a strategy the company said would fund its cloud-enabled charging network — reported by Macquarie Group’s own newsroom, March 2023.
• April 2024: British International Investment committed $19 million, aimed at accelerating deployment of high-speed charging across Chennai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Bengaluru, as per Entrepreneur India, May 2024.
• Total raised: reported at $86.1 million across seven rounds by Inc42, and at $97.5 million across twelve rounds by Tracxn — trackers disagree on the exact figure and round count, but both place cumulative funding in the high-$80-million-to-high-$90-million range.
• Valuation: not disclosed by ChargeZone. A single aggregator, Tracxn, lists an estimated ₹500 crore mark as of December 2023 — a figure this piece treats as unconfirmed, since it sits below the company’s own cumulative raise and no second source corroborates it.

What each backer changed: BlueOrchard’s Series A1 was the round that funded the first large fleet-serving rollout rather than isolated stations; Macquarie’s stake brought a global infrastructure investor’s balance sheet association rather than a large disclosed cheque; and British International Investment’s commitment was explicitly earmarked for expansion into seven named metro markets rather than general working capital.

How it makes money

• Retail charging fees: per-kWh charges paid by individual EV owners through the ChargeZone app at its own AC and DC stations.
• Fleet and B2B contracts: usage agreements with e-bus, e-truck and e-car fleet operators, the segment that Series A1 funds were explicitly directed toward in March 2023 (1,130 e-buses/e-trucks plus 1,250-plus e-car fleets, per Autocar Professional).
• OEM tie-ups: charging access built around vehicles from Hyundai, Mahindra & Mahindra, Tata Motors, Volvo Eicher and Ashok Leyland, as per Entrepreneur India, May 2024.
• Interoperability/roaming: since April 2025, ChargeZone earns from and pays out to rival networks (Statiq, Bolt, Kazam and others) whose users roam onto its chargers and vice versa, expanding utilisation of existing hardware without new capex.
• Franchise fees under the DOCO model (2026 onward): outside investors fund station capex (minimum ₹1 crore per station); ChargeZone develops, commissions and operates the site, capturing operating economics without carrying the asset on its own books, as per electrive.com, April 2026.
• Software: ChargeCloud, its charge-management platform, underpins both owned and franchised sites; the company has put roughly ₹400 crore into this software-and-infrastructure build-out since founding, according to humansofev.info.

The part people get wrong: a charging network’s revenue is often assumed to come mostly from retail top-ups by individual drivers. ChargeZone’s own disclosed use-of-funds statements suggest the opposite — its highest-profile funding round was sized around fleet and commercial-vehicle contracts, not retail footfall, and its most recent growth strategy (roaming plus franchising) is explicitly about monetising a network it does not fully own, rather than expanding its own asset base.

The numbers

Only two years of financial detail are publicly available for this private company at the time of writing, as aggregated by Inc42 from regulatory filings; figures for FY22 and FY25 were not found in verifiable form and are omitted rather than estimated.

• Revenue grew 15.0% year-on-year, from ₹47.6 crore in FY23 to ₹54.8 crore in FY24 (Inc42).
• Total assets rose 115% year-on-year to ₹311.6 crore in FY24, consistent with a company still in heavy station-building mode (Inc42).
• FY24 net loss margin worked out to roughly -14.4% of revenue, even with a positive estimated EBITDA of ₹9.3 crore — a gap typically explained by depreciation and financing costs on a fast-growing fixed-asset base (Inc42).

Where the money comes from

• Geography: overwhelmingly India-focused, with stations reported across 37-plus cities and more than 20,000 km of highway corridors as of March 2023, plus an early-stage presence in the UAE by 2024 (Macquarie Group; Entrepreneur India).
• Highway corridors already live include Delhi-Mumbai, Delhi-Chandigarh, Bengaluru-Hyderabad, Bengaluru-Chennai, Mumbai-Hyderabad, Mumbai-Bengaluru and Vizag-Chennai, per electrive.com, April 2026.
• Channel split within the 13,500-station network claimed in April 2025: roughly 5,400 stations were company-owned, with the remaining majority reached through OCPI roaming partnerships with seven other networks, as per humansofev.info.
• Vehicle segments: passenger EVs charged via the retail app, and a commercial fleet segment (e-buses and e-trucks) that the company’s largest funding round was explicitly sized around — 1,130-plus commercial vehicles and 1,250-plus e-car fleets referenced in the March 2023 Series A1 announcement (Autocar Professional).
• The surprise: the “largest network” claim leans more on partnership plumbing than on owned hardware — a majority of the 13,500 stations attributed to ChargeZone in April 2025 belonged to competitor networks it had struck roaming deals with, not to ChargeZone itself.

The risks

• Grid and capex intensity: remote and highway sites have suffered unreliable grid connections, forcing ChargeZone to spend roughly ₹10 crore on a single off-grid solar-and-battery hub and to deploy battery storage at seven other highway locations just to keep chargers running — a cost that owned-and-operated expansion keeps incurring station by station (S&P Global Autotech Insight).
• Persistent losses on a growing asset base: FY24 revenue grew 15.0% and EBITDA was estimated positive at ₹9.3 crore, yet the company still posted a net loss of ₹7.9 crore as total assets swelled 115% to ₹311.6 crore — a sign that depreciation and financing costs on new stations are currently outpacing operating profit (Inc42).
• Reliance on partners it also competes with: the April 2025 “largest network” position depends on continued goodwill from Statiq, Bolt, Kazam, Pulse Energy, Chargemod, ElectreeFi and Evnnovator — rival charging networks that ChargeZone also competes against for highway locations, OEM tie-ups and franchise partners, and that could unwind roaming access if commercial terms change (Autocar Professional; Free Press Journal).

The takeaway

ChargeZone’s founder built on a simple wager: that infrastructure has to arrive before demand does, not after. That wager forced two expensive corrections along the way — paying for off-grid power where the public grid would not cooperate, and admitting that no single balance sheet could own enough chargers to matter at national scale. The lesson that travels beyond EV charging is less about electric vehicles and more about capital-intensive first-mover bets generally: being early to build the infrastructure layer of a market can force you to fund things a later entrant would never have to (backup power, grid workarounds), and it can also force you to give up sole ownership of the very asset you built first, trading it for a partnership or franchise structure, in order to reach the scale your original head start promised.

Frequently asked questions

What does ChargeZone do?

ChargeZone builds and operates electric-vehicle charging stations across India for individual drivers, fleet operators and OEM partners, and since 2025 it also aggregates access to rival charging networks through interoperability partnerships.

Who founded ChargeZone and when?

Kartikey Hariyani and Pavan Bakeri founded ChargeZone in 2018 in Vadodara, Gujarat. Hariyani had previously run solar EPC firm TecSo Projects Limited from 2010.

How much funding has ChargeZone raised?

Trackers put cumulative funding between $86.1 million (Inc42, seven rounds) and $97.5 million (Tracxn, twelve rounds), including a $54 million Series A1 round led by BlueOrchard Finance in March 2023 and a $19 million commitment from British International Investment in April 2024.

Is ChargeZone profitable?

No. It posted a net loss of ₹7.9 crore in FY24 on revenue of ₹54.8 crore, even though estimated EBITDA was positive at ₹9.3 crore, as per Inc42’s aggregation of company filings.

Is ChargeZone really India’s largest EV charging network?

The company made that claim on 24 April 2025 based on a combined network of 13,500 stations, but roughly 5,400 of those were company-owned; the rest were reachable through roaming agreements with seven competing networks, as per Autocar Professional and humansofev.info.

Sources

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

• Inc42, “ChargeZone — Funding, Revenue & Investors,” accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “ChargeZone Financials — Revenue, P&L & Cash Flow,” accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, “ChargeZone — Company Profile, Team, Funding, Competitors & Financials,” accessed September 2026
• Entrepreneur India, “EV Charging Infra Startup Charge Zone Raises USD 19 Mn from British International Investment,” May 2024
• Autocar Professional, “CHARGEZONE secures US$54 million in Series A1 funding round led by BlueOrchard,” March 2023
• EVreporter, “CHARGE+ZONE raises $54M funding as part of Series A1,” March 2023
• Macquarie Group, “Macquarie Capital invests in India’s ChargeZone to expand its fast-charging network,” March 2023
• Autocar Professional, “ChargeZone Expands to Become India’s Largest EV Charging Network,” April 2025
• Free Press Journal, “Charge Zone Becomes India’s Largest EV Charging Network with 13,500 Stations,” April 2025
• electrive.com, “India: ChargeZone to set up over 1,000 highway charging stations,” April 2026
• humansofev.info, “ChargeZone Becomes India’s Largest EV Charging Network, Plans ₹400 Cr Capex in FY26,” 2026
• S&P Global Autotech Insight, interview with Kartikey Hariyani, Founder and CEO, ChargeZone, on off-grid solar and BESS charging hubs
• Crunchbase, “ChargeZone — Company Profile & Funding,” accessed September 2026
• Trading Economics, USD/INR exchange rate, 18 September 2026

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