Pulkit Khurana and Siddharth Sikka did not arrive at Battery Smart through a single flash of insight. The idea emerged gradually, shaped by time spent with drivers and fleet operators, listening to what slowed them down. Across cities, millions of e-rickshaws were running on lead-acid batteries that demanded hours of charging every night, frequent replacements, and regular maintenance. The costs were not abstract. Downtime meant lost income, day after day.
Two questions kept surfacing. What if drivers did not have to own the battery? And what if a drained battery could be swapped for a charged one in a couple of minutes? Battery swapping, Khurana would later say, could cut upfront costs by around 40%, improve uptime and raise earnings, easing the shift to cleaner mobility. The insight was simple, but the implications were not.
Khurana and Sikka had known each other since their days at IIT Kanpur. What bound them was a shared inclination to build for scale and for Indian conditions. Before Battery Smart, both had worked at startups in logistics and digital payments, experiences that exposed them to the operational friction of large systems and the trade-offs between ambition and execution. Electric vehicles (EVs) felt inevitable, but adoption among 2- and 3-wheelers — the backbone of urban last-mile transport — remained limited. In 2019, they decided to build around that gap, with a focus on making EV use economical and reliable rather than technologically ornate.
The first two years were marked by iteration rather than expansion. Early conversations with drivers, fleet owners, OEMs and city officials repeatedly forced the founders to revise their assumptions. Station designs were reworked, battery formats reconsidered, pricing tweaked and operating models adjusted. Sikka recalls that each iteration moved the idea closer to something that could work at scale — practical, affordable and resilient to everyday constraints. Even now, he says, the model continues to evolve.
Observation Over Assumption
Their first office reflected that mindset. In June 2020, Battery Smart began operations from a battery swap station in Janakpuri in west Delhi. It was a functional space, doubling up as a workplace and a live testing ground. The setup was modest, but it allowed the team to observe behaviour in real time and refine processes without distance from the end user.
The broader ecosystem, however, was still taking shape. Battery swapping had no established standards, few reference points and limited regulatory clarity. Convincing drivers to trust a shared battery model required patience. Convincing policymakers and partners required even more. Early scepticism came not only from outside investors and regulators, but also from friends and family who questioned whether drivers would pay for a service model and whether the market was large enough to sustain it.
For the founders, time on the ground proved decisive. Months of observing income cycles and maintenance costs led them to a counter-intuitive conclusion: drivers were not price-averse, but value-conscious. If a service reduced downtime and stabilised earnings, adoption would follow. That belief shaped a model designed to be simple to use and immediately beneficial, rather than one that relied on future efficiency gains.
Scaling the Grid
By the time Battery Smart began to scale, the contours of the business were clearer. Today, the New Delhi-headquartered firm operates in over 50 cities through a network of around 1,600 swap stations, most of them run by local entrepreneurs. It has over 100,000 active customers on its battery-as-a-service platform. In FY25, revenue from operations rose 49% year-on-year to `279 crore, reflecting both network expansion and higher utilisation.
External capital arrived early in the journey. In mid-2020, the firm raised a seed round of `2 crore from Orios Venture Partners, a moment Khurana describes as validating and sobering in equal measure. It pushed the team to think faster and with greater discipline. Since then, Battery Smart has raised over $135 million, with backing from investors including Tiger Global, Blume Ventures, LeapFrog and MUFG.
Scale has brought new use cases. By powering delivery fleets for platforms such as Zomato, Zepto and Swiggy, Battery Smart has positioned itself as infra rather than just a service provider. The emphasis, Khurana says, has remained on solving operational realities, aligning incentives for drivers, station partners and fleet operators, while keeping utilisation high enough to make the economics work.
Looking back, the most consequential moment was not the first fundraise or the hundredth station, but the first few customers who signed up. It was proof that a model built from observation rather than assumption could find traction.