Startup Deep Dive : Royal Brothers — raised just $1.28M yet books Rs 46 crore revenue

Royal Brothers has taken outside money exactly three times since it was incorporated in May 2015, and the largest of those three cheques — a “corporate minority” investment from Yamaha Motor’s Indian mobility arm in February 2022 — was never disclosed. Yet the Bengaluru bike-rental platform booked ₹46.2 crore (~$4.8 million) in revenue in FY25, up 20.5% on the year before, according to Inc42’s company-filing data. The contradiction sits one line below that growth number: the same filings, summarised by company-database tracker TheCompanyCheck, show profit falling 586.19% and net worth falling 1,348.17% in FY24, the most recent year for which that comparison is available.

That gap — rising revenue, collapsing profitability — is the story of a decade-old startup that grew mostly on other people’s capital: franchise fees, individual bike owners leasing their vehicles back to the platform, and, eventually, one motorcycle manufacturer’s fleet. Royal Brothers never took the venture-capital route that defined its shared-mobility peers. It is still deciding, ten years in, whether that was discipline or a ceiling.

Quick facts

What they do

Royal Brothers rents two-wheelers — mopeds, gearless scooters, commuter motorcycles and premium machines including Royal Enfield, KTM, Benelli, BMW and Harley-Davidson models — to riders who need a bike for a few hours, a holiday week, or several months, without owning one. The company’s own materials describe three customer-facing products: short self-drive rentals booked by the hour or day; a longer subscription line, Royal Brothers X, for stretches of up to nine months; and guided tours and interstate travel packages built on the same fleet (royalbrothers.com/about, accessed September 2026). Its network runs on a mix of company-managed stock, franchisee-operated outlets and bikes owned by individual retail investors who lease them back to the platform for a revenue share — so the vehicle a customer picks up may belong to Royal Brothers, to a local franchise partner, or to someone who bought it purely as a rental asset. The customer base splits between leisure and business travellers renting for short trips, delivery and gig workers taking monthly leases, and, more recently, corporate fleet partners after Yamaha’s mobility arm began routing its own motorcycles through the platform in 2022.

The origin

The idea traces to a single bad rental experience. In 2014, Abhishek Chandrashekar and Akash Suresh — then 22-year-old, third-year engineering students at R V College of Engineering in Bengaluru, studying mechanical engineering and computer science respectively — took a trip to Puducherry and tried to rent a bike through an informal vendor found on JustDial. There was no email confirmation, no documentation, and no accountability if anything went wrong (The Weekend Leader; The Better India). The two came back convinced that no organised, RTO-compliant operator offered two-wheeler rentals in Karnataka, and that the gap between how people wanted to rent a bike and how the unorganised market actually worked was itself the business. Kuldeep Purohit, an automobile enthusiast, joined roughly three months after the company launched to round out the founding team. Accounts differ on how the venture was first bankrolled — The Weekend Leader puts the initial outlay at ₹7.5 lakh from family funds, while The Better India reports ₹20 lakh borrowed from friends and family — but both agree on the essential point: there was no institutional money behind day one, only personal savings and a five-motorcycle fleet.

The struggle years

Getting legal to operate took longer than building the product. Karnataka had no existing licensing framework for two-wheeler self-drive rentals, so the founders had to walk transport officials through the Central government scheme that technically permitted it. “We took almost six months to procure the first licence in Karnataka,” the founders told Motoring Trends. “As the officials were not aware of the procedures and the bike rental scheme, we had to educate them about the Central Government’s scheme and the State Government’s role in processing the application.” Banks were no easier to convince: lenders were reluctant to back three college-age founders with an unlicensed, unproven idea, and the company ultimately secured its Karnataka clearance only after the founders met the state transport secretary directly to make the case for the economic upside (The Weekend Leader). The licence came through in July 2015, two months after incorporation, and the company opened with five motorcycles before adding ten gearless scooters that October (The Weekend Leader).

The second shock arrived five years later and hit demand rather than paperwork. Royal Brothers’ core product — hourly and daily self-drive rental, built for tourists, weekend riders and short trips — collapsed almost overnight once COVID-19 lockdowns began in March 2020, because the entire premise of the business was strangers sharing a vehicle in quick succession. The founders’ response, conceived in the second month of the lockdown, was Royal Brothers X: a long-term subscription product, priced from roughly ₹3,000 a month, letting a single rider keep one bike for weeks or months rather than handing it back the same day (Motoring Trends). It was a defensive pivot born directly out of a demand shock, not a planned product roadmap.

The turning point

For its first seven years, Royal Brothers scaled almost entirely on franchise capital, bike-owner investment and two small funding rounds. That changed in February 2022, when Yamaha Motor’s newly formed mobility arm, Moto Business Service India (MBSI) — set up in March 2021 to run two-wheeler asset-management services for shared-mobility startups — took a minority stake in Royal Brothers for an undisclosed sum, in what Tracxn’s funding log records as a “corporate round” dated 23–24 February 2022. At the time, Royal Brothers was licensed across seven states — Karnataka, Kerala, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan and Telangana — and operating in 20-plus cities (Entrepreneur India, 24 February 2022). MBSI’s managing director Shoji Shiraishi framed the deal as an employment and utilisation play: “We will onboard two-wheelers across multiple cities and generate employment avenues for the youth of India.” Royal Brothers CEO Abhishek Chandrashekar tied it to a bigger ambition: “We want to give access to 500 million Indians to move around on a motorcycle or scooter without owning a vehicle.”

The numbers on the other side of that deal arrived 18 months later. By August 2023, MBSI had deployed more than 1,000 motorcycles onto the Royal Brothers platform across South India, with plans to extend into North, West and East India, and had begun steering the partnership toward B2B use cases such as last-mile delivery fleets (Devdiscourse, 11 August 2023). It was the first time an original-equipment motorcycle manufacturer, rather than a franchisee or an individual retail investor, had put its own fleet capital behind the platform — a qualitatively different kind of backer from anything in Royal Brothers’ first seven years.

The money behind it

Royal Brothers’ capital history is short and almost entirely non-institutional. Three disclosed rounds make up its full funding record:

• 31 May 2015, Seed — $281,000: an early-stage round with investors not individually named in public trackers (Tracxn).
• 17 February 2019, Pre-Series A — $1 million: the company’s first outside institutional-style capital, from angel investors including Amrith Prasad and Pradeep Deviah, roughly four years after launch (Inc42; Tracxn).
• 23–24 February 2022, Corporate round — amount undisclosed: a minority investment from Yamaha Motor via Moto Business Service India (MBSI), Yamaha’s shared-mobility asset-management unit (Tracxn; Entrepreneur India).

Total disclosed funding across the three rounds is $1.28 million — roughly ₹12.3 crore at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 — which is a modest sum for a decade-old, multi-state consumer platform (Inc42; Tracxn). No priced valuation from any round has been made public. What each backer changed differs by round: the 2015 seed money funded the founding fleet and the first licensing push; the 2019 pre-Series A gave the company its first angel-investor validation after four years of running on founder savings and franchise fees; and the 2022 Yamaha/MBSI round was less about cash than about access to a manufacturer’s own fleet capital and B2B distribution, which materialised as the 1,000-plus-motorcycle deployment recorded in August 2023.

How it makes money

Royal Brothers earns from renting two-wheelers, but a large share of the fleet it rents out is not capital the company put up itself.

• Money in — self-drive rental: hourly and daily bookings on company-managed and franchise-managed bikes, the original and still-largest product line since 2015.
• Money in — long-term subscription: Royal Brothers X, the monthly-lease product built during the 2020 COVID pivot, priced from around ₹3,000 a month for a single rider keeping one bike for weeks or months (Motoring Trends).
• Money in — franchise royalties: franchise partners invest roughly ₹5–10 lakh, including a ₹1 lakh brand fee, to run a 300–400 sq ft outlet under a three-year agreement; the franchisee keeps roughly 80% of outlet revenue and Royal Brothers retains a 20% royalty, with the company itself projecting a payback period of one to two years for the franchisee (FranchiseIndia.com, accessed September 2026) — figures broadly consistent with the 80:20 franchisee-to-company split reported for the company’s earlier 2018-era franchise expansion (The Weekend Leader).
• Money in — bike-owner leasing (“Earn With Us”): individual investors buy a two-wheeler, lease it to Royal Brothers under a three-year contract, and split rental revenue 70:30 in the owner’s favour, with earnings paid monthly and tracked through a partner app; the vehicle reverts to the investor at the end of the term (royalbrothers.com/earn-with-us, accessed September 2026) — the same 70:30 split the company was already running under its “bike-owner tagging” model as far back as 2016 (The Weekend Leader).
• Money in — B2B and delivery leasing: monthly leases to delivery and gig-economy riders, and, since the 2022 Yamaha tie-up, OEM-backed fleet deployment aimed at last-mile logistics partners (Devdiscourse, August 2023).
• Costs out: fleet maintenance and retirement decisions run through an in-house Vehicle Health Management team that tracks odometer readings and model age (Motoring Trends); insurance and theft losses are a recurring cost — the company reported losing three bikes to theft in its early years before rolling out GPS tracking and insurance cover as standard (The Weekend Leader).
• Where the margin sits: in the channels where Royal Brothers doesn’t have to buy the vehicle. A 20% royalty on a franchisee’s revenue, or a 30% cut of an individually owned bike’s earnings, carries none of the depreciation, insurance or theft exposure that sits on a company-owned bike’s balance sheet.
• The part people get wrong: renting from “Royal Brothers” does not mean renting from Royal Brothers’ own fleet. A meaningful share of the two-wheelers on the platform are financed by franchise partners or individual retail investors under revenue-share contracts — the brand operates more like a managed rental marketplace than a classic owned-fleet rental chain.

The numbers

Royal Brothers does not publish standalone profit-and-loss statements; the revenue figures below come from Inc42’s company-filing data, cross-checked against TheCompanyCheck’s independent summary of the same Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings, which reports FY24 revenue growth of 73.2% on a FY23 base — a calculation that lands within rounding of Inc42’s own FY24 figure, derived here from its stated 20.5% FY25 growth rate. All figures in ₹ crore.

• FY23 revenue: ₹22.1 crore, up 206.5% year-on-year (TheCompanyCheck’s MCA-filing summary).
• FY24 revenue: approximately ₹38.3 crore — two independent trackers arrive at essentially the same figure by different routes: TheCompanyCheck reports 73.2% growth on the FY23 base, and Inc42’s stated 20.5% FY25 growth rate implies the same FY24 number when worked backward from its disclosed ₹46.2 crore FY25 figure.
• FY25 revenue: ₹46.2 crore, up 20.5% year-on-year (Inc42).
• Profitability: TheCompanyCheck’s summary of the company’s FY24 MCA filing records a 586.19% year-on-year fall in profit and a 1,348.17% fall in net worth — absolute rupee figures are not published in the available summary, but the direction is unambiguous: revenue roughly tripled between FY23 and FY24 while profitability moved sharply the other way.
• Capital structure: authorised capital of ₹2.90 crore against paid-up capital of ₹2.48 crore, per the company’s MCA registration record (InstaFinancials).

Where the money comes from

Royal Brothers has not published an exact revenue split by channel, geography or vehicle segment, but its public statements and press coverage point to a business built on several overlapping layers rather than one uniform rental line.

• By fleet ownership: a mix of company-managed stock, franchisee-owned bikes (roughly 80% of outlet revenue retained locally) and individually owned bikes under the “Earn With Us” leasing programme (70% of that bike’s revenue paid to the owner) — meaning a large and currently undisclosed share of gross rental revenue never reaches Royal Brothers’ own top line before the split (franchiseindia.com; royalbrothers.com/earn-with-us).
• By geography: the network is still concentrated in South and West India relative to its licensing history — Karnataka, Kerala, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan and Telangana were the seven states named around the 2022 Yamaha investment (Entrepreneur India) — even as the company’s own site pages, both accessed in September 2026, put current reach anywhere from 23 cities (royalbrothers.com/about) to 30-plus cities (royalbrothers.com/earn-with-us), with company-database tracker InstaFinancials separately counting 26 cities. The spread across the company’s own pages is itself a sign of how fluid the franchise network’s footprint is.
• By vehicle tier: everyday commuter mopeds and gearless scooters sit alongside premium and superbike rentals — Royal Enfield, KTM, Benelli, BMW and Harley-Davidson models were all part of the fleet by 2020 (The Weekend Leader) — with the higher-value machines typically financed through the same franchise or individual-investor model rather than bought outright by the company.
• By customer type: leisure and tourist self-drive rental was the founding use case, long-term monthly leasing to individuals and delivery riders grew out of the 2020 pandemic pivot, and B2B/last-mile delivery fleet leasing is the newest layer, added through the Yamaha/MBSI partnership from 2022 (Devdiscourse, August 2023).
• The surprise: the business the founders built to fix a personal, one-off tourist-rental headache in 2014 now earns a meaningful share of its growth from B2B delivery-fleet leasing and OEM-backed motorcycles — a segment that did not exist on the platform until a global two-wheeler manufacturer decided to route its own fleet through it in 2022.

The risks

• Profitability has not kept pace with revenue: FY24 revenue rose roughly 73% year-on-year even as profit fell 586.19% and net worth fell 1,348.17% over the same MCA-filing period (TheCompanyCheck) — a pattern consistent with a business buying growth through discounting, franchise incentives or fleet expansion faster than its margins can absorb.
• State-by-state regulatory exposure: two-wheeler self-drive rental requires a separate RTO licence in each state, and the founders have said it took roughly six months to secure just the first one, in Karnataka, because officials had no precedent for processing it (Motoring Trends). A decade on, the company is licensed in only seven to eight states — a fraction of India’s 28 states and 8 union territories — which means each new market still carries the same negotiation and timeline risk that nearly stalled the company at launch.
• Franchise- and investor-fleet quality risk, on thin capital: with roughly 80% of franchise-outlet revenue and 70% of individually owned bikes’ revenue flowing to third parties rather than the company, vehicle upkeep, safety standards and customer experience depend on thousands of small franchise and retail-investor operators the company does not directly employ, while theft and damage remain a standing cost (three bikes were lost to theft before GPS tracking and insurance became standard, per The Weekend Leader). That third-party-heavy model has to compete against better-capitalised rivals: Bounce alone raised ₹36 crore in 2026 from existing investors Accel and B Capital toward its EV rental push, against Royal Brothers’ entire disclosed funding history of $1.28 million (~₹12.3 crore) since 2015.

The takeaway

Royal Brothers built its network almost entirely on other people’s capital — franchise fees, individually owned bikes leased back under revenue-share contracts, and eventually a manufacturer’s own fleet — while raising barely over a million dollars in disclosed venture-style funding across a decade. That approach let three college-age founders scale a licence-heavy, asset-intensive business without giving up much equity, and it is a genuinely different playbook from the cash-burning shared-mobility startups that raised far more and, in several well-documented cases, shut down anyway. But the same structure means Royal Brothers captures only a slice — 20% here, 30% there — of the revenue moving through its own network, and its own regulatory filings now show that even the revenue it does keep is not converting into profit at anywhere near the rate it is growing. Building on other people’s capital is a way to avoid one kind of fragility; it does not automatically avoid the other kind, which shows up in a profit-and-loss statement rather than a cap table.

Frequently asked questions

What does Royal Brothers do?

Royal Brothers is a Bengaluru-based two-wheeler rental platform offering hourly and daily self-drive bike and scooter rentals, a longer monthly subscription product called Royal Brothers X, franchise-operated outlets, an individual bike-owner leasing programme, and, since 2022, B2B and last-mile delivery fleet leasing.

Who founded Royal Brothers and when?

It was founded by Abhishek Chandrashekar and Akash Suresh, both 22-year-old engineering students at R V College of Engineering, Bengaluru, after a 2014 trip to Puducherry exposed how unorganised bike rentals were; Kuldeep Purohit joined roughly three months later. The company was incorporated as Royalbison Autorentals India Private Limited on 15 May 2015 and began operating that July.

How much funding has Royal Brothers raised?

Disclosed funding totals $1.28 million (~₹12.3 crore) across three rounds: a $281,000 seed round in May 2015, a $1 million pre-Series A in February 2019 from angel investors including Amrith Prasad and Pradeep Deviah, and an undisclosed corporate-minority investment from Yamaha Motor’s mobility arm, Moto Business Service India, in February 2022 (Inc42; Tracxn). No valuation has been publicly disclosed for any round.

Is Royal Brothers profitable?

The company has not published absolute profit-and-loss figures. TheCompanyCheck’s summary of its FY24 Ministry of Corporate Affairs filing records a 586.19% year-on-year fall in profit and a 1,348.17% fall in net worth even as revenue grew roughly 73% that year, which points to significant margin pressure rather than a profitable, self-funding business.

How many cities does Royal Brothers operate in?

The company’s own web pages give different counts as of September 2026 — its About page lists 23 cities while its Earn With Us investor page cites 30-plus — and company-database tracker InstaFinancials separately counts 26 cities. The company has said it holds two-wheeler rental licences in seven to eight Indian states, including Karnataka, Kerala, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan and Telangana.

Sources

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

• Inc42, “Royal Brothers — Funding, Revenue & Investors,” accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “Royal Brothers — Total Funding, Funding Over Time, Funding By Rounds,” accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, “Royal Brothers — Company Profile, Team, Funding, Competitors & Financials,” accessed September 2026
• TheCompanyCheck, “Royalbison Autorentals India Private Limited — FY 2025 Insights,” accessed September 2026
• InstaFinancials, “Royalbison Autorentals India Private Limited” company filing record, accessed September 2026
• The Better India, “How A Holiday Led These Engineers To Build A 7.5 Crore Bike Rental Company,” accessed September 2026
• The Weekend Leader, “The Brave Entrepreneurs” — story of Royal Brothers founders Abhishek Chandrashekar, Akash Suresh and Kuldeep Purohit, accessed September 2026
• Motoring Trends, “Royal Brothers, A Temporary Bike Rental With A Permanent Connect,” accessed September 2026
• Royal Brothers, “About Royal Brothers,” royalbrothers.com/about, accessed September 2026
• Royal Brothers, “Earn With Royal Brothers,” royalbrothers.com/earn-with-us, accessed September 2026
• FranchiseIndia.com, “Royal Brothers Franchise Cost, How to Get, Contact, Fee, Apply,” accessed September 2026
• Entrepreneur India, “Yamaha Motor Invests in Bike Rental Platform Royal Brothers,” 24 February 2022
• Devdiscourse, “MBSI expands fleet with Royal Brothers,” 11 August 2023

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.