Startup Deep Dive : Grinntech — it licensed batteries into 40,000 vehicles before it built a factory

For seven years, Grinntech never sold a single finished battery pack under its own name. It licensed its lithium-ion pack technology to other manufacturers instead, and by August 2020 that licensed technology was already riding inside more than 40,000 vehicles on Indian roads, according to a report in The News Minute at the time. Then, within five years of finally building its own factory, the Chennai company stopped existing as an independent business at all.

On 20 February 2025, Grinntech Motors & Services Pvt. Ltd. was acquired outright by Yuma Energy, a battery-swapping and battery-as-a-service operator, according to reports in Autocar Professional and Mobility Outlook published the same week. A company that had spent twelve years and roughly $4 million (as per Inc42 and CB Insights) building cell-to-pack expertise for two- and three-wheelers ended its independent life as somebody else’s missing manufacturing piece. Its story is less a rocket-ship funding tale and more a case study in what it costs to stay solo in a capital-hungry, cell-import-dependent business.

Quick facts

What they do

Grinntech designs and assembles lithium-ion battery packs and the battery management systems (BMS) that keep them safe, for electric two-wheelers, three-wheelers, farm tractors and light commercial vehicles. It does not make battery cells. It buys cylindrical, prismatic or pouch cells from outside suppliers and does the harder, more specialised part around them: mechanical packaging, thermal management and the embedded electronics that monitor charge, temperature and safety. Its founder, Nikhilesh Mishra, has described this as the “cell to pack” layer of the battery value chain, which he estimates at roughly the final 35% of the value add, sitting between a raw cell and a vehicle-ready pack, as per an interview he gave to CircuitDigest. Its customers have included Indian original equipment manufacturers in the tractor and two-wheeler space, and at least one United States-based OEM for whom it built a custom thermal-managed pack, according to a June 2021 report by EMobility+.

The origin

The idea traces back to a winter in 2008, not a startup pitch deck. Nikhilesh Mishra was in his final year of mechanical engineering at IIT Roorkee, giving lectures to juniors through the college’s SAE chapter on automotive systems. When his lecture series reached electric-vehicle drivetrains and batteries, he came away convinced, in his own telling to CircuitDigest, that his professional life would track the shift “from gasoline engines to EVs.” After graduating, he and a college friend, Puneet Jain, decided to build a company around that bet rather than take conventional jobs. Grinntech Motors & Services was incorporated in 2013 in Chennai, as per company profiles on Inc42 and Tracxn, with Mishra as CEO and Jain as co-founder and chief operating officer.

The founding insight was narrower than “electric vehicles will win.” It was that the battery pack, not the vehicle body or the motor, would be the hardest and most valuable part of that transition to get right in India, and that a small, technically deep team could own that piece without having to build a car company or a cell factory around it.

The struggle years

The years between the idea and a working business were long and largely self-funded. Mishra has said the early team tried and discarded several battery chemistries, including zinc-air and sodium-nickel-chloride designs, before settling on lithium-ion, and experimented with business models as different as battery swapping and do-it-yourself EV conversion kits before any of them found paying customers, as per the CircuitDigest interview. By his own account, it was only around 2016, with battery costs still the biggest barrier to EV adoption and India’s FAME subsidy regime not yet in place, that Grinntech’s technology reached what he called a “basic level” of maturity.

Even after that, the company stayed what Mishra called “bootstrapped” for years, funded mostly by its own promoters rather than outside investors. As of August 2020, only about $1 million had gone into the company, and it had come from the two founders and IIT Madras Research Park’s incubator, RTBI, as reported by The News Minute at the time. Grinntech’s route to revenue in this period was not manufacturing but licensing: it sold its pack technology to other battery makers rather than making and selling packs itself, a lower-capital but also lower-margin position in the value chain. The company has said this licensed technology had gone into more than 40,000 battery installations by that point, though Grinntech itself had not yet built or run a factory.

The turning point

The pivot away from being purely a licensor came in August 2020. Grinntech closed a $2 million round in which the founders and RTBI’s existing $1 million was matched by roughly $1 million more from a new set of backers: Lakshmi Narayanan, former vice-chairman of Cognizant; Dr V Sumantran, former vice-chairman of Ashok Leyland; K S Manian of the Radiance Group; and automotive-component maker UCAL, as reported by The News Minute in August 2020. Narayanan and Sumantran joined Grinntech’s board.

That capital, topped up by a further $2 million bridge round in June 2021 from existing investors, funded Grinntech’s first owned manufacturing line: a plant in Chennai’s Ambattur Industrial Estate with capacity for up to 400 MWh of lithium-ion battery packs a year, which had begun production by the time EMobility+ reported on the bridge round in June 2021. The company went, inside roughly twelve months, from a licensing-only outfit with no factory and about $1 million in outside capital to a manufacturer with its own plant, around 70 engineers and staff on site, and export orders including a thermal-managed pack for a US-based OEM. It was the first time Grinntech captured the full margin on a battery pack rather than a licensing fee on someone else’s.

The money behind it

• IIT Madras Research Park’s RTBI incubator — an early backer alongside the founders, part of the roughly $1 million invested before August 2020 (The News Minute, August 2020)
• Lakshmi Narayanan, co-founder and former vice-chairman of Cognizant — joined the August 2020 round and Grinntech’s board (The News Minute, August 2020)
• Dr V Sumantran, former vice-chairman of Ashok Leyland — joined the August 2020 round and the board (The News Minute, August 2020; Autocar Professional, September 2021)
• K S Manian (Radiance Group) and UCAL, an automotive-component group — completed the remaining roughly $1 million of the August 2020 round (The News Minute, August 2020)
• June 2021 bridge round: about $2 million (roughly ₹15 crore at the time), with all existing investors participating, taking disclosed lifetime funding to about $4 million across two named rounds (EMobility+, June 2021; Inc42; CB Insights)
• Latest valuation: not disclosed in any filing or report reviewed for this piece

How it makes money

Grinntech’s revenue model changed shape once, and that change is the most useful thing to understand about the business.

• Before 2020: revenue from licensing its battery-pack technology and engineering know-how to other battery manufacturers, who then built and sold the physical packs — an asset-light model that reached over 40,000 installations without Grinntech running a single production line of its own (The News Minute, August 2020)
• From 2021: revenue from manufacturing and selling its own branded pack families — Finch and Monal for two-wheelers, Robin for larger two- and three-wheelers, and Falcon, Hawk and Pelican for tractors and light commercial vehicles — directly to OEMs, plus at least one export contract to build a custom thermal-managed pack for a US-based OEM (EMobility+, June 2021; Autocar Professional, September 2021)
• Costs: Grinntech does not make cells, so its largest input cost is externally sourced lithium-ion cells; its own value-add and intellectual property sit in mechanical design, thermal management and the embedded battery-management electronics around those cells (CircuitDigest interview)
• Margin and take rate: not disclosed in any source reviewed — Grinntech has not published gross margin, per-pack pricing or licensing fee structures, so this piece does not estimate them

The part people tend to get wrong is assuming a “battery company” makes batteries end to end. Grinntech’s real business was always the layer of design and integration around a cell it buys from someone else, first sold as knowledge, later sold as hardware.

The numbers

Grinntech is a private company and has not published multi-year profit-and-loss statements. The only revenue figures found in the public record, sourced from Tracxn’s company financials, cover two consecutive fiscal years; profit or loss for either year was not disclosed.

That is a roughly 310.6% jump in revenue in one year, as per Tracxn’s filings data, coinciding with the period immediately after Grinntech’s manufacturing ramp-up and shortly before its acquisition by Yuma Energy. Earlier years’ revenue was not found in any source opened for this piece and is not estimated here.

Where the money comes from

• By vehicle segment: two-wheeler packs (Finch, Monal series, spanning 48V-72V), three-wheeler and larger two-wheeler packs (Robin 72), and tractor/light-commercial-vehicle packs at up to 100V (Falcon, with Hawk and Pelican at an earlier, experimental stage), as per Autocar Professional’s September 2021 feature
• By customer geography: primarily domestic Indian OEMs, alongside at least one US-based OEM for which Grinntech built a custom thermal-managed pack, as per EMobility+, June 2021
• By revenue model era: pre-2020 licensing revenue (technology sold to other battery makers) versus post-2021 direct manufacturing revenue (Grinntech-branded packs sold to OEMs), as per The News Minute, August 2020, and EMobility+, June 2021

The surprise is that Grinntech’s widest reach on Indian roads, the 40,000-plus installations cited in 2020, came almost entirely from the licensing era, before the company owned a single production line. Its own-manufactured volumes, built on the Ambattur plant from 2021, cover a shorter track record than the licensed technology that made the company’s early reputation.

The risks

• Cell import dependency: Grinntech does not manufacture battery cells and sources them externally, which ties its input costs and lead times to overseas cell suppliers rather than to its own supply chain (The News Minute, August 2020; CircuitDigest interview)
• Cost and scale gap versus China: Mishra has acknowledged that Indian vendor development for battery components still lags Chinese suppliers “in cost and timeline,” a gap that squeezes margins for a domestic pack assembler competing on price (CircuitDigest interview)
• Thin capital base for a capital-intensive business: Grinntech’s total disclosed outside funding was about $4 million across twelve years (Inc42; CB Insights), a small base against the cost of running and expanding a dedicated manufacturing plant; the company’s eventual outcome, full acquisition by a better-capitalised player rather than an independent scale-up, is consistent with that funding gap

The takeaway

Grinntech’s arc is a reminder that owning a piece of technology is not the same as owning a business built on it. For seven years, the company’s know-how sat inside tens of thousands of vehicles it never manufactured, generating reach without control and, it seems, without the capital to convert that reach into an independent, scaled company. Building its own factory in 2021 was meant to close that gap. It bought Grinntech four more years of independent life, a wider product range and its first export orders, but not enough scale or capital to keep standing alone against a well-funded battery-as-a-service operator hunting for exactly the manufacturing depth Grinntech had built. The lesson for a deep-tech founder is not “license less” or “manufacture sooner.” It is that the capital required to defend a technical edge tends to arrive later, and in larger amounts, than the capital required to first prove it.

Frequently asked questions

What does Grinntech make?

Grinntech designs and assembles lithium-ion battery packs and battery management systems for electric two-wheelers, three-wheelers, tractors and light commercial vehicles. It sources battery cells externally rather than manufacturing them itself.

Who founded Grinntech and when?

Grinntech was founded by Nikhilesh Mishra and Puneet Jain and incorporated in 2013 in Chennai, according to Inc42 and Tracxn. The idea originated from Mishra’s final-year lectures on EV drivetrains at IIT Roorkee in 2008.

How much funding has Grinntech raised?

Grinntech’s disclosed lifetime funding is about $4 million, raised across an August 2020 round backed by Lakshmi Narayanan, Dr V Sumantran, K S Manian, UCAL and RTBI, and a June 2021 bridge round from existing investors, as per The News Minute, EMobility+, Inc42 and CB Insights. Its valuation has not been publicly disclosed.

Is Grinntech still an independent company?

No. Grinntech was acquired by Yuma Energy, a battery-as-a-service and battery-swapping operator, on 20 February 2025, as reported by Autocar Professional and Mobility Outlook.

What was Grinntech’s revenue before the acquisition?

Grinntech’s revenue rose from ₹3.8 crore in FY24 to ₹15.6 crore in FY25, a roughly 310.6% increase, according to Tracxn’s financial data. Profit or loss figures for either year were not disclosed.

Sources

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

• Inc42 — Grinntech company profile, funding and financials (accessed September 2026)
• Tracxn — Grinntech company profile and financials (accessed September 2026)
• CB Insights — Grinntech company and funding profile (accessed September 2026)
• The News Minute — “IIT-Madras incubated R&D firm Grinntech to start manufacturing lithium-ion batteries” (28 August 2020)
• EMobility+ — “EV Battery Maker Grinntech Raises $2 million” (24 June 2021)
• Autocar Professional — “IIT Madras-born Grinntech sets out on an EV-charging mission” (2 September 2021)
• CircuitDigest — Interview with Nikhilesh Mishra, CEO of Grinntech (accessed September 2026)
• Grinntech — company website, About Us (accessed September 2026)
• Autocar Professional — “Yuma Energy Acquires Grinntech to Expand Battery Technology and Manufacturing” (20 February 2025)
• Mobility Outlook — “Yuma Energy Acquires Grinntech To Strengthen Battery-as-a-Service Ecosystem” (20 February 2025)

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