Startup Deep Dive : Tork Motors — an Rs 1.29 crore bill sent India’s electric motorcycle pioneer into insolvency

A company that supplied electric powertrains for more than 700 three-wheelers on Indian roads, backed by Ratan Tata and majority-owned by a Pune engineering conglomerate, is now being sold off piece by piece under a bankruptcy tribunal’s watch. Tork Motors built India’s first home-grown electric motorcycle brand, Kratos, and quietly powered someone else’s three-wheelers too — yet the same subsidy the government withdrew, and the same single funding round that never arrived, were enough to stop production altogether.

By October 2025, the Mumbai bench of the National Company Law Tribunal had admitted an insolvency petition against Tork Motors over an unpaid bill of just ₹1.29 crore (as per the tribunal order reported by LiveLaw, October 2025) — a rounding error next to the more than ₹200 crore (~$20.8 million) that Bharat Forge alone had poured into the company (Autocar India, August 2024). This is the story of how that gap opened up.

Quick facts

What they do

Tork Motors makes and sells electric motorcycles under the Kratos name, aimed at Indian riders who want a two-wheeler that looks and rides like a conventional geared bike rather than a scooter. Separately, and less visibly to the public, Tork designs and supplies the electric powertrain — motor, controller, battery pack and wiring harness — that other manufacturers bolt onto electric three-wheeler chassis, turning Tork into a components vendor for a segment of the market it does not brand at all (Mobility Outlook).

The origin

The company began as a student project, not a business plan. In 2009, Kapil Shelke and three classmates at D.Y. Patil College of Engineering in Akurdi, Pune, set out to build India’s fastest electric motorcycle. Their first machine, the T1X, placed third in a TTXGP race tied to the Isle of Man circuit; the follow-up, T2X, won the TTXGP race outright in 2010 (YourStory; CrazyEngineers). That racing pedigree became the founding insight: India’s roads did not need another electric scooter, they needed a proper motorcycle, and the team that had already proven it could build a competitive electric powertrain from scratch was best placed to do it. Tork Motors was incorporated in Pune the same year, 2010, with Shelke as sole founder, and work on a road-legal prototype, the T6X, began around 2015, with the prototype unveiled in September 2016 (Autocar India; Autocar Professional).

The struggle years

Tork’s gap between founding and first commercial motorcycle sale ran to roughly twelve years, and it was not a quiet wait. Early on, the company survived on small angel cheques rather than institutional capital: in 2016, Ola co-founders Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati put in about ₹3.5 crore, and the same year Ratan Tata invested an undisclosed sum just ahead of the T6X’s planned commercial debut (YourStory, 2019; Autocar India). The T6X itself never became a mass-market product — it was succeeded, years later, by the Kratos, which finally reached showrooms on 26 January 2022 at an ex-showroom Pune price of ₹1,07,999, with the higher-spec Kratos R at ₹1,22,999 (Business Standard, January 2022; Autocar Professional). That is a twelve-year run from incorporation to a commercially launched product — an unusually long runway even by hardware-startup standards.

The second setback landed after the product finally existed. India’s FAME-II subsidy for electric two-wheelers was cut back starting May 2023 and withdrawn entirely by March 2024, and because a motorcycle needs roughly twice the battery of a scooter to deliver a comparable range, Tork’s cost base was hit harder than lighter-vehicle rivals — effective prices rose by roughly 25% overnight once the subsidy support disappeared (Autocar India, August 2024). By December 2023, dealers say the company had stopped dispatching vehicles to them altogether, and the strain culminated in the layoff of close to 100 employees in July 2024, some of whom were owed dues going back to March that year (Autocar India; Entrepreneur India, August 2024).

The turning point

The single event that separates “struggling startup” from “company heading into insolvency” is a funding round that was announced as done and then, by most later accounts, never actually arrived. In February 2024, Entrackr and Inc42 reported that Tork had closed a ₹50 crore (~$6 million) round from Maxis Capital/Maxis Advisors, taking its post-money valuation to roughly ₹370 crore (~$45 million) and its shareholding table to Bharat Forge 52.46%, Maxis Advisors 13.51% and founder Kapil Shelke 19.42% (Entrackr, 20 February 2024). Barely six months later, Autocar India and Entrepreneur India were reporting that the money had not materialised, and that people inside Tork believed the round’s collapse — not just the FAME withdrawal — was what tipped the company into crisis (Autocar India; Entrepreneur India, August 2024).

The numbers on each side make the swing concrete. Before: a reported ₹50 crore infusion, a ₹370 crore valuation, and stated plans to expand distribution from Pune to 70–100 cities. After: close to 100 employees laid off in July 2024, dealers filing police complaints over undelivered stock and unpaid dues, production idled since December 2023, and Bharat Forge — whose subsidiary Kalyani Powertrain by then held 64.29% of the company — writing off its investment altogether, a decision its vice chairman Amit Kalyani attributed publicly to “the funding freeze and the impact of the FAME… subsidy norms,” adding that Tork had come close to closing an investor twice and both times the deal fell through (Team-BHP; Entrepreneur India, August 2024). By October 2025, an operational creditor’s unpaid invoice — for helping Tork chase a separate, larger fundraise that also failed to close — was enough to put the company into formal insolvency proceedings (LiveLaw, October 2025).

The money behind it

Tork’s capital structure was unusually concentrated for a twelve-year-old startup: most of its money came from one strategic backer rather than a spread of venture funds.

• Bharat Forge — the Pune auto-components maker became Tork’s anchor investor and, through its subsidiary Kalyani Powertrain, its controlling shareholder; it put in more than ₹200 crore (~$20.8 million) cumulatively (Autocar India, August 2024) and its stake rose from 52.46% (February 2024) to 64.29% (August 2024) as the company needed repeated bailout capital, before it wrote the investment off entirely once the FAME-II subsidy ended and a rescue round fell through (Team-BHP; Entrepreneur India, August 2024).
• Ratan Tata — invested an undisclosed personal sum in 2016 ahead of the T6X’s planned launch, lending the young company credibility it could not otherwise buy (Autocar India, 2019; YourStory, 2019).
• Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati (Ola co-founders) — put in about ₹3.5 crore as early angel backers in 2016, before Ola itself became an electric-vehicle competitor (YourStory, 2019).
• Maxis Capital/Maxis Advisors — reported to have led a ₹50 crore (~$6 million) round in February 2024 for a 13.51% stake, later reported to have not actually funded the round, and separately linked by Tork’s own NCLT submission to a bigger, ₹180 crore financing attempt that also failed to close (Entrackr, February 2024; Autocar India, August 2024; LiveLaw, October 2025).

Total funding raised across the company’s life is reported inconsistently by different trackers: Tracxn and CB Insights put cumulative funding at roughly $10.2–10.8 million across about six rounds, while PitchBook lists a higher $15.5 million; none of these figures appear to include the bulk of Bharat Forge’s direct strategic investment, which is disclosed separately in Indian media as exceeding ₹200 crore. Given the conflict, both ranges are worth naming rather than picking one.

How it makes money

Tork ran two distinct revenue lines under one roof, and the less glamorous one may have mattered more to its unit economics.

• Direct-to-consumer motorcycle sales — Kratos and Kratos R, sold through dealers starting in Pune from January 2022 and intended to expand to Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Surat and Delhi; launch pricing was ₹1.08–1.23 lakh ex-showroom, rising by roughly 25% once the FAME-II subsidy was withdrawn (Business Standard, January 2022; Autocar India, August 2024).
• B2B powertrain supply — Tork designed and supplied the motor, controller, battery pack and wiring harness that turn a bare three-wheeler shell into an electric vehicle, for customers including Greaves, Okaya, Baxy and Omega Seiki Mobility, under exclusive sourcing agreements; components had gone into more than 700 electric three-wheelers on the road, with a further 1,500-plus units in the order book, at an average ticket size of ₹50,000–₹1,00,000 per vehicle (Mobility Outlook).

Neither business publishes a take rate or gross margin. What the company did say, repeatedly, is the part people tend to get wrong: a motorcycle is not just a bigger scooter. It needs roughly twice the battery capacity of a scooter to deliver a usable range (160–200+ km versus 80–100 km), which raises the bill of materials and makes the whole product far more sensitive to battery-cost swings and subsidy withdrawal than the electric-scooter category that dominates headlines (Autocar India, August 2024).

The numbers

No FY25 figures are publicly available. Production had effectively stopped from December 2023 onward, and by the time FY25 accounts would ordinarily be filed, the company was heading into insolvency proceedings rather than a normal reporting cycle.

Where the money comes from

• By business line — consumer motorcycle sales (Kratos/Kratos R) versus B2B powertrain and component supply to third-party electric three-wheeler makers; the company has not broken out the revenue split between the two publicly.
• By geography — motorcycle sales launched in Pune (January 2022) with stated plans to expand to Chennai, Mumbai, Bangalore, Surat and Delhi by the end of that fiscal year; dealer coverage never scaled much beyond the initial market before deliveries stopped in December 2023 (Mobility Outlook; Autocar India).
• The surprise — a company known publicly as a motorcycle brand had, by several accounts, a steadier and arguably more defensible business quietly supplying powertrains into other companies’ three-wheelers under exclusive-sourcing terms; that business had already shipped components into more than 700 vehicles with 1,500-plus more ordered, yet it still went down with the parent when the capital dried up, because both lines shared the same balance sheet and the same single controlling investor (Mobility Outlook; Autocar India).

The risks

• Single-backer concentration. Bharat Forge, through Kalyani Powertrain, held a majority stake that climbed from 52.46% to 64.29% within a single year (February–August 2024) as it repeatedly funded shortfalls. When that one backer chose to write off its investment rather than fund another rescue, there was no second major shareholder positioned to step in — a structural risk of relying on one strategic investor rather than a syndicate (Entrackr; Team-BHP; Entrepreneur India, 2024).
• Subsidy dependence in a battery-heavy category. Electric motorcycles need roughly double the battery of an electric scooter to be usable, which means the category is more exposed than scooters to subsidy changes; FAME-II’s phase-down from May 2023 and full withdrawal by March 2024 raised effective prices by about 25% overnight and directly preceded the company’s production halt (Autocar India, August 2024).
• Unpaid-vendor risk turning into formal insolvency. A single unpaid advisory invoice of ₹1.29 crore — for a fundraising mandate that itself failed to close — was sufficient for the National Company Law Tribunal to admit an insolvency petition and appoint an interim resolution professional in October 2025, since Indian bankruptcy law does not treat financial distress as a valid defence against an acknowledged, unpaid debt (LiveLaw, October 2025).

The takeaway

Tork’s story is not really about electric motorcycles failing to find riders — Kratos had bookings, dealers and a real product on the road. It is about what happens when a capital-intensive hardware company builds its survival plan around two single points of failure at once: one policy subsidy and one controlling investor. Either alone might have been survivable. FAME-II’s withdrawal squeezed margins the way it squeezed every two-wheeler maker; losing one funding round is a setback most startups absorb. Tork absorbed both in the same year, with no other shareholder large enough, or motivated enough, to bridge the gap. The lesson travels well beyond motorcycles: when a subsidy and a single backer are both load-bearing, a hardware company should assume it will eventually need to survive the loss of one of them without warning — and plan its cash runway, and its cap table, accordingly.

Frequently asked questions

What does Tork Motors make?

Tork Motors makes electric motorcycles under the Kratos and Kratos R names, sold directly to riders, and separately designs and supplies electric powertrains — motors, controllers, battery packs and wiring harnesses — to other manufacturers’ electric three-wheelers (Mobility Outlook).

Who founded Tork Motors, and when?

Kapil Shelke, a mechanical engineer, founded Tork Motors as sole founder and CEO; the company was incorporated in Pune on 22 March 2010, following a college racing project that began in 2009 (MCA company record; YourStory).

Why did Bharat Forge write off its investment in Tork Motors?

Bharat Forge’s vice chairman Amit Kalyani said the write-off followed “the funding freeze and the impact of the FAME… subsidy norms,” after a reported rescue round with Maxis Capital/Maxis Advisors failed to close in 2024 (Team-BHP; Entrepreneur India, August 2024).

Is Tork Motors still operating?

No normal operations were reported as of this writing. Production had been halted since December 2023, close to 100 staff were laid off in July 2024, and the company entered Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process on 31 October 2025 after the NCLT Mumbai admitted a creditor’s petition; resolution plans were invited with a submission deadline of 15 March 2026, and no outcome had been publicly reported as of September 2026 (LiveLaw, October 2025; IBBI filings).

How much money did Tork Motors raise in total?

Estimates differ by tracker: Tracxn and CB Insights put total funding at roughly $10.2–10.8 million across about six rounds, while PitchBook lists $15.5 million; separately, Indian media report that Bharat Forge alone invested more than ₹200 crore (~$20.8 million) directly, a figure not fully captured in the trackers’ totals.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Bharat Forge-backed Tork Motors raises $6 Mn in new round,” February 2024
• Inc42, “Ratan Tata-Backed TORK Motors Raises $6 Mn In Funding,” February 2024
• Autocar India, “Tork Motors struggles to secure funding,” August 2024
• Entrepreneur India, “Tork Motors On Verge Of Shutting Down?,” August 2024
• Team-BHP, “Bharat Forge writes off its investment in Tork Motors,” August 2024
• LiveLaw, “NCLT Mumbai Initiates Insolvency Proceedings Against Pune-Based EV Startup Tork Motors,” October/November 2025
• Mobility Outlook, “The Story Of Tork Motors Beyond Electric Two-Wheelers”
• Business Standard, “Bharat Forge-backed Tork Motors launches e-motorcycle KRATOS, KRATOS-R,” 26 January 2022
• Autocar Professional, “Tork Motors launches e-motorcycle Kratos and Kratos-R at Rs 108,000,” January 2022
• YourStory, “Why Ratan Tata chose to invest in EV startup Tork Motors,” 2019
• Autocar India, “Ratan Tata to invest in Pune-based EV start-up Tork Motors,” 2019
• CrazyEngineers, “Tork Motors Founder and CEO Kapil Shelke on Building Race-Track Ready Electric Motorcycles In India”
• Tracxn, “Tork Motors — Company Profile, Team, Funding, Competitors & Financials,” 2026
• CB Insights, “Tork Motors — Financials”
• PitchBook, “Tork Motors — Company Profile”
• Tofler, “Tork Motors Private Limited — Financials”
• Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India, corporate process filings for Tork Motors Private Limited, 2026

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