Startup Deep Dive : Vidyut – cheaper than petrol autos by never selling the battery

Vidyut cuts the upfront price of an electric three-wheeler by refusing to sell its most expensive part. The Bengaluru startup unbundles the lithium-ion battery from the vehicle and rents it out by the kilometre instead, a model that carried a post-money valuation of Rs 148 crore (about $15.4 million at $1 ≈ Rs 96.0) when it closed its Series A in February 2024 (Entrackr, Feb 2024; TheKredible, Feb 2024). Yet in FY23, the first year it billed customers at any real scale, the company reported revenue of just Rs 68 lakh to Rs 88.1 lakh against a loss of Rs 3 crore — meaning it lost between three and four times what it earned in the very year its financing model went to market (Entrackr, Feb 2024; TheKredible, 2024).

Two IIT alumni built that model on a narrow but stubborn observation: a battery pack alone is 35-40% of an electric three-wheeler’s sticker price, and no bank or NBFC wanted to lend against it because nobody had years of data on how fast it degraded or what a used one would fetch. Vidyut’s fix was to keep the vehicle as an ordinary loan and turn the battery into rent — “a fuel, not an asset,” as co-founder Xitij Kothi has put it. The harder problem, this piece finds, was never persuading a driver to switch from CNG to electric. It was persuading anyone who lends money professionally to trust a battery’s second-hand value, and Vidyut is still, three-plus years and three funding rounds in, in the middle of proving that case.

Quick facts

What they do

Vidyut sells what it calls EV ownership infrastructure to two groups of buyers: commercial three-wheeler operators — auto-rickshaw drivers and last-mile delivery fleets — and, since September 2024, passenger EV buyers. The product sits on three legs: battery-as-a-service financing that separates a vehicle’s chassis (financed like an ordinary loan) from its battery (rented by the kilometre, billed as a running cost rather than sold upfront); an insurance and maintenance layer bundled into the same contract; and NextRide, an assured resale programme that inspects, values and resells used commercial EVs. Vidyut distributes through eight vehicle manufacturers — Tata Motors, Mahindra Last Mile Mobility, Piaggio, Bajaj Auto, Montra Electric, Euler Motors, Greaves and MG Motor India — and two lending partners, Shivalik Small Finance Bank and Ecofy, across roughly 30 Indian cities as of February 2025 (Vidyut company website, accessed September 2026; Outlook Business, Feb 2025).

The origin

Xitij Kothi, an IIT Bombay alumnus, had already founded a logistics startup called Parcelled and worked at Rivigo and Swiggy before Vidyut. Gaurav Srivastava, an IIT Kharagpur and IIM Ahmedabad graduate, came from Boston Consulting Group and had led the EV vertical at Bounce. The two incorporated VidyutTech Services Private Limited in Bengaluru on 9 November 2021 (Tofler, MCA filing; CIN U50400KA2021PTC154044).

Their shared observation came from adjacent jobs in logistics and shared mobility: gig workers and small fleet owners already wanted to swap petrol and CNG three-wheelers for electric ones to cut their per-kilometre running cost, but could not clear the first hurdle. A lithium-ion battery pack alone runs 35-40% of an electric three-wheeler’s price (Autocar Professional, Feb 2024), and no formal lender wanted to underwrite that battery, because nobody yet had years of real-world data on how fast it degraded or what it would be worth secondhand (Flourish Ventures, Feb 2025). Kothi and Srivastava’s answer was to keep the vehicle as a loan-financed asset but strip the battery out of the purchase price entirely, charging for it instead as a running cost — treating it, in Kothi’s words, “as a fuel” rather than an asset to be owned (EVreporter, Sept 2024).

The struggle years

Vidyut’s first public product, in 2022, was narrower than the one it runs today: plain vehicle loans priced at 18-22% annual interest, sold alongside an assured-resale promise for used commercial EVs (YourStory, May 2022). It had real early traction — loans sanctioned for “hundreds” of vehicles within its first two months live, on a team of about 20 people (YourStory, May 2022) — but an 18-22% interest rate on a full vehicle purchase eats directly into the fuel-cost savings that make an EV attractive to a price-sensitive driver in the first place, and it left the industry’s core problem untouched: nobody would lend against the battery on its own.

The company spent its first two years, in effect, building its own underwriting model for an asset class — used EV battery packs — that had no market history to draw on, funding that work with a mix of equity and debt rather than being able to borrow against a track record it did not yet have (Autocar Professional, Feb 2024; Flourish Ventures, Feb 2025). Revenue reflected the slog: Vidyut was pre-revenue through its first full year and only began billing at scale in FY23, when it reported income of Rs 68 lakh (Entrackr, Feb 2024) or Rs 88.1 lakh (TheKredible, 2024) — sources disagree on the exact figure, though both cite the same Registrar of Companies filing — against a loss of Rs 3 crore, consistent across both. That is a loss between roughly three and four times its revenue, in the very year its financing model first reached customers.

The turning point

For its first three years, Vidyut’s entire addressable market was electric three-wheelers, a segment industry estimates size at around $2 billion by 2030 (Autocar Professional, Feb 2024). That changed on 30 September 2024, when Vidyut partnered with JSW MG Motor India to launch battery-as-a-service financing for passenger electric cars — the MG Comet EV, Windsor EV and ZS EV — with battery rental starting at Rs 2.5 per km on the Comet (EVreporter, Sept 2024). The mechanic was identical to the three-wheeler product: buy the car without the battery, rent it over a financing term of three to five years depending on the model, then keep renting, buy the pack outright, or exit at its residual value (EVreporter, Sept 2024).

The number on the other side of that one partnership is the real turning point. The passenger EV financing opportunity it opened is sized at roughly $41 billion by the same industry estimates (Autocar Professional, Feb 2024) — about twenty times the $2 billion three-wheeler-only market Vidyut had spent three years and two funding rounds building its underwriting model around. A single OEM tie-up, agreed without changing the underlying financing mechanic at all, moved Vidyut’s theoretical addressable market by an order of magnitude.

The money behind it

Vidyut has raised capital roughly every 12-18 months since incorporation, in a mix of equity and debt rather than pure equity rounds, which is typical for a business that has to fund a lending book rather than just build software.

• Seed, December 2022: $4 million, equity and debt, co-led by Force Ventures and Veda VC, with participation from Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar, CRED founder Kunal Shah and Swiggy co-founder Shriharsha Majety among other angels (Entrackr, Feb 2024).
• Series A, February 2024: a $10 million round (equity and debt) led by 3one4 Capital, priced at Rs 64,690 per share, taking Vidyut to a post-money valuation of Rs 148 crore — about $15.4 million at $1 ≈ Rs 96.0 (Entrackr, Feb 2024; TheKredible, Feb 2024). Of the primary equity allotted at that filing, 3one4 Capital put in Rs 22.2 crore for a 15% stake, Zephyr Peacock India Growth Fund contributed Rs 7.1 crore for 13.96%, Saison Capital (Credit Saison) added Rs 8 crore for 5.41%, and LetsVenture, AngelList and angels Sujeet Kumar and Rajiv J Chaudhri together put in a further Rs 2.7 crore; the round also included venture debt from Alteria Capital (Entrackr, Feb 2024). The company’s ESOP pool was expanded by 768 options to a total of 1,879, valued at Rs 12.1 crore at the same filing (Entrackr, Feb 2024).
• February 2025: a further $2.5 million from Flourish Ventures, a global fintech-focused investor, earmarked to scale the BaaS financing book across both commercial and the newly-added passenger segment (Entrackr, Feb 2025; Outlook Business, Feb 2025).
• Cumulative funding: over $16.5 million raised across its rounds as of February 2025 (Entrackr; Outlook Business, Feb 2025).

What each backer changed: Force Ventures and Veda VC funded the two pre-revenue years spent building the underwriting model; 3one4 Capital’s Series A lead, alongside Alteria Capital’s debt line, gave Vidyut the balance-sheet room to both originate loans and absorb early battery-residual-value risk; Flourish Ventures’ cheque was earmarked specifically for scaling the BaaS book once the passenger-vehicle segment opened up (Flourish Ventures, Feb 2025).

How it makes money

• The split: an electric three-wheeler’s cost breaks roughly 60-65% chassis (capex, financed like a normal vehicle loan) and 35-40% battery (opex, rented by the km) (Autocar Professional, Feb 2024).
• Worked example: a Rs 4,00,000 electric three-wheeler with a Rs 1,50,000 battery becomes a Rs 2,50,000 vehicle loan under Vidyut’s model — Rs 45,000 cheaper on day one than a comparable CNG auto priced around Rs 2,95,000 — with the battery separately billed at Rs 1.8-1.9 per km (Autocar Professional, Feb 2024).
• Passenger-vehicle version: the MG Comet EV’s battery rental starts at Rs 2.5 per km, with financing terms of three to five years depending on the model, after which the customer can keep renting, buy the battery outright, or exit at its residual value (EVreporter, Sept 2024).
• Resale line: NextRide, live since July 2024 in Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, manages inspection, valuation, sale and RTO paperwork for used commercial EVs, claiming three to four times the resale value a traditional second-hand dealer would offer (DriveSpark, July 2024, quoting co-founder Xitij Kothi).
• Take rate: no separate published fee percentage or take rate was found in sources checked this session, so it is not stated here; the per-km battery charge itself is Vidyut’s margin over its cost of financing, running, replacing and eventually recycling the pack, on top of bundled insurance and maintenance fees.
• What people get wrong: the “cheaper EV” pitch is a financing structure, not a subsidy or a technology breakthrough. Vidyut still has to fund or own the battery on its own balance sheet, recover it if a customer defaults, and correctly price what it will be worth after three to five years of daily last-mile use — precisely the underwriting problem that kept formal lenders out of this market in the first place (Flourish Ventures, Feb 2025).

The numbers

Vidyut is a private company that files summary accounts with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. Only FY23 and FY24 have been reported in rupee terms by outlets or trackers accessible this session; FY22 was pre-revenue by the company’s own account, and FY24’s loss and any FY25 figures sit behind paywalled trackers (Tofler Pro, Tracxn Pro) that were not opened this session, so those cells are left blank rather than estimated.

• FY23 revenue: Rs 68 lakh as per Entrackr’s review of the RoC filing (Feb 2024), or Rs 88.1 lakh as per TheKredible’s review of the same filing (2024) — the two trackers disagree on the exact figure; the Rs 3 crore loss is consistent across both.
• FY24 revenue: Rs 2.2 crore, implying growth of roughly 150-170% year-on-year over FY23 depending on which FY23 base figure is used (Tofler MCA-filing data, cited via a Tracxn company-financials snapshot).
• Headcount: 109 employees as of a 28 February 2025 snapshot, up 58% year-on-year (Dealroom.co, accessed September 2026) — a rough proxy for how fast the underwriting and account-management side had to scale as the loan book grew.
• What is missing: FY24 net loss and any FY25 revenue or profit/loss figures were not found in any source opened this session and are cut rather than estimated.

Where the money comes from

• Core segment: commercial electric three-wheelers — cargo and passenger autorickshaws — financed through OEM partners including Mahindra Last Mile Mobility, Piaggio, Euler Motors, Greaves, Altigreen and Montra Electric (DriveSpark, July 2024; Vidyut company website).
• New segment: passenger electric cars, added September 2024 through JSW MG Motor India (MG Comet EV, Windsor EV, ZS EV), and extended in December 2024 to Mahindra Last Mile Mobility’s Zor Grand and Treo Plus three-wheelers and its ZEO four-wheeler (EVreporter, Sept 2024; Autocar Professional, Dec 2024).
• Resale line: NextRide, live in Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru and Hyderabad since July 2024, with an online marketplace and six more cities — Mumbai, Chennai, Pune, Lucknow, Agra and Kanpur — planned within the same fiscal year (DriveSpark, July 2024).
• Geography: distribution across roughly 30 Indian cities as of February 2025 (Outlook Business, Feb 2025).
• The surprise: Vidyut built its brand, its first three years of operating history and its underwriting model entirely on electric three-wheelers, a segment worth an estimated $2 billion by 2030. The passenger-EV segment it only entered in September 2024 is worth roughly twenty times that, about $41 billion (Autocar Professional, Feb 2024). The company’s larger addressable market is not the one it is known for.

The risks

• Subsidy cliff on its core segment: demand incentives for electric three-wheelers under the PM E-DRIVE scheme are due to lapse on 31 March 2026; those incentives currently shave 25-35% off an e3w’s ex-factory price, and prices for affected models are expected to rise 20-40% once they end (Global Fleet, 23 Dec 2025). Vidyut’s pitch depends on an e3w being cheaper than a CNG equivalent from day one — a subsidy-driven price jump on the vehicle side could erase the gap its battery-rental model exists to protect, or force it to rent batteries at thinner margins to compensate.
• Battery residual-value and data risk: Vidyut and its lending partners are underwriting an asset — a used EV battery pack — with no long public performance history behind it; Flourish Ventures, one of Vidyut’s own investors, has said this exact data gap is why “traditional lenders hesitate to fund” EV batteries (Flourish Ventures, Feb 2025). If real-world battery degradation runs faster than priced in, the shortfall lands on Vidyut’s own book, not just the customer’s.
• Continuous capital dependency: Vidyut has raised fresh equity and debt roughly every 12-18 months since 2021 to keep growing its loan and rental book (Autocar Professional, Feb 2024); Rs 68 lakh to Rs 2.2 crore of annual revenue is nowhere near enough to fund a fleet-financing business organically. A gap in that funding cycle, in a tighter capital market, would slow new disbursals well before it shows up in the company’s published numbers.

The takeaway

Vidyut’s insight was narrow and, in hindsight, obvious: when a market’s biggest adoption barrier is the price of one component, the fix does not have to be a better component, it can be a different way of paying for the one that already exists. Reclassifying a battery from an asset a driver owns to a service a driver rents cut the entry price of an electric three-wheeler below a CNG one without waiting for battery chemistry to get cheaper. But the harder, less visible part of that move is that Vidyut now owns exactly the risk that made banks reluctant in the first place — how fast a battery degrades, what it is worth used, whether a driver keeps paying. Two years of thin, loss-making revenue before the model found its feet, and a fundraising cadence that has to repeat every 12-18 months to keep the book growing, are the price of taking on a risk nobody else in the value chain wanted to hold. The transferable lesson is not “unbundle the expensive part” — it is that unbundling only works if you are prepared to spend years being the first lender anyone can point to, before the data exists to make that lending look safe to somebody else.

Frequently asked questions

What does Vidyut do?

Vidyut finances commercial and, since September 2024, passenger electric vehicles by separating the vehicle from its battery: the vehicle is financed as a normal loan, while the battery is rented by the kilometre under a battery-as-a-service model. It also bundles insurance and maintenance into its financing contracts and runs NextRide, an assured resale platform for used commercial EVs.

Who founded Vidyut and when was it incorporated?

Xitij Kothi (IIT Bombay; previously at Rivigo and Swiggy) and Gaurav Srivastava (IIT Kharagpur, IIM Ahmedabad; previously at Boston Consulting Group and Bounce) founded Vidyut. The legal entity, VidyutTech Services Private Limited, was incorporated in Bengaluru on 9 November 2021.

How much funding has Vidyut raised, and from which investors?

Vidyut raised a $4 million seed round in December 2022 co-led by Force Ventures and Veda VC, a $10 million Series A in February 2024 led by 3one4 Capital with Zephyr Peacock, Saison Capital and Alteria Capital, and a further $2.5 million from Flourish Ventures in February 2025 — over $16.5 million cumulatively as of February 2025 (Entrackr; Outlook Business).

Is Vidyut profitable?

No. In FY23, the first year it billed customers at scale, Vidyut reported revenue of Rs 68 lakh to Rs 88.1 lakh (sources disagree on the exact figure) against a net loss of Rs 3 crore. FY24 revenue rose to about Rs 2.2 crore, but its FY24 loss figure was not found in any source opened this session.

What is battery-as-a-service and how does it lower EV costs?

Battery-as-a-service (BaaS) removes the battery — 35-40% of an electric three-wheeler’s price — from the upfront purchase and charges for it instead as a per-kilometre running cost. On a Rs 4,00,000 three-wheeler with a Rs 1,50,000 battery, that turns the purchase into a Rs 2,50,000 vehicle loan, undercutting a comparable CNG auto, while the battery is billed separately at roughly Rs 1.8-1.9 per km.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Exclusive: EV financing startup Vidyut set to raise Series A,” February 2024
• Entrackr, “Vidyut raises $10 Mn in Series A led by 3one4 Capital,” February 2024
• Entrackr, “Vidyut raises $2.5 Mn to expand battery-as-a-service financing biz,” February 2025
• TheKredible, “EV financing firm Vidyut records Rs 88 lakh in revenue in FY23, losses cross Rs 3 cr,” 2024
• Tofler, company filing summary for VidyutTech Services Private Limited (CIN U50400KA2021PTC154044), accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, company-financials snapshot for VidyutTech Services Private Limited, accessed September 2026
• Zaubacorp, company record for VidyutTech Services Private Limited, accessed September 2026
• Autocar Professional, “Vidyut to make EVs more affordable with BaaS financing model,” February 2024
• Autocar Professional, “Mahindra Last Mile Mobility partners with Vidyut to launch Battery-as-a-Service for Commercial EVs,” December 2024
• EVreporter, “Vidyut partners with JSW MG Motor India to launch a battery rental program for electric cars,” September 2024
• Outlook Business, “EV financing startup Vidyut raises $2.5 mn to expand its BaaS offerings,” February 2025
• Flourish Ventures, “Powering EV Adoption: Why We Invested in Vidyut’s Battery-as-a-Service Model,” February 2025
• 3one4 Capital, “3one4 Capital Leads Vidyut’s $10M Series A Funding Round,” February 2024
• YourStory, “How Vidyuttech, founded by Swiggy, Bounce execs, is helping commercial EVs with financing and resale,” May 2022
• DriveSpark, “Vidyut Launches Used EV Sales And Financing Platform,” July 2024
• Global Fleet, “India’s FAME Subsidy Cliff — 31 March 2026,” 23 December 2025
• Dealroom.co, company and team data for VidyutTech, accessed September 2026
• Vidyut company website (vidyuttech.in), accessed September 2026

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