The Story of the Indian ‘Tron’
1030 hrs, February 23, 2016, a startup conference at a convention centre in north Bengaluru: Ather Energy, a startup that few have heard of beyond the city, has just unveiled a smart, electric scooter, named the S340. Ather’s co-founder and CEO Tarun Mehta rides the scooter onto the stage. He talks of the scooter’s features — its touchscreen dash, its acceleration, and other specifications… — before asked when customers can buy it. After all, India is the world’s biggest market for two-wheelers and Ather has a shot at success, if anywhere, in its home country.
It will launch for sale in 2017, says Mehta, who looks more like a mid-level geek than a smart vehicle CEO.
That was to be — but 18 months later.
The automobile industry is amid a substantial technological disruption where Electric Vehicle is the preferred choice because of its inherent efficiency that will shape urban commute and the cities of tomorrow. India, being a country dependant on the import of crude oil, the electric revolution will be a substantial step in making it a more robust economy. In parallel, the world around us is getting connected, enabling the integration of devices and making our life experiences seamless. Intelligent vehicles will revolutionize our commute experience in the future.
Keeping all these facts in mind, Ather came into being and today, with an ahead-of-the-times vision, it has created a name for itself in the automobile space.
Fons Et Origo
Ather began its journey in October 2013 at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras Research Park. Mehta and co-founder Swapnil Jain both IIT-M alumni (B.Tech & M.Tech batch of 2012 in engineering design) had set out to build India’s first smart electric scooter. They had brief stints at Ashok Leyland and General Motors respectively.
Mehta recalls the support of R. Krishnakumar, a professor at the Department of Engineering Design at IIT-Madras. “If a professor says, ‘Leave your job and come back; we will take care of everything,’ I think that is a great morale boost,” says the Ather CEO. “For the first five-six months, we literally camped out of the department. We were just hanging around in his labs and other department labs before we sort of reached a conclusion that ‘This seems interesting and we should actually start a company and build a product.’ It was a very important phase and he was super supportive then.”
Jain, Ather’s co-founder and CTO today, says the first idea was to build a battery swap model, but soon realised it didn’t make sense. (During his M.Tech degree days, Mehta had applied for a patent for a swappable battery system.)
“When we started, we said that we will only build batteries for existing vehicles because there is no Lithium-ion battery (pack in the market). We will build it and sell them. We thought that batteries were the only thing wrong with electric vehicles,” says Jain.
But, that’s when the realisation hit home that “almost everything is wrong in the existing vehicles”. “You can’t just expect that I will change the battery and things will suddenly become right. We can’t build just a battery, we have to build a complete vehicle and then sell it,” he adds of the earliest learning of the duo.
The Metamorphosis
In June 2014, Arun Vinayak joined the team as chief product officer. He had studied mechanical engineering at IIT-Madras and was a year junior to Mehta and Jain.
Jain and Vinayak were part of the auto club — a student auto enthusiast group that built formula student cars — where they worked on several projects together.
“The auto club is a student-run lab, part of the Center for Innovation at IIT-M. That’s where Swapnil and I first met,” says Vinayak.
The car they built was taken to race at Hockenheim, Germany in 2011–12; Silverstone, the home of the British Grand Prix in 2012; and again in Germany in 2013. But, building a go-kart was much easier than an electric scooter, the team soon realised. Being the first entrants into the smart electric scooter market in the country, they had to deal with an ecosystem and infrastructure that didn’t exist.
It took the team about a year to get on their feet in terms of investor backing. The team had raised some capital from friends and IIT-Madras professors and it took a year until mid-2015 to raise its Series A funding: a bold round of $12 million from Tiger Global.
Mehta adds: “We took a while to find our feet and find some money… only in April 2015, we found our first big cheque.”
Tiger Global boss Lee Fixel saw promise in the team’s ground-up approach, as also would have surely been encouraged by the investment of Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, the co-founders of Flipkart, given that he was their biggest backer in the ecommerce company.
“We see great potential in Ather’s product offering and the technology and are confident that their maiden launch will attract a tremendously positive response,” he said in a statement.
The Year Of Learning
By early 2016, Ather had raised a total of $13 million in funding and had started hiring and bringing in enough people who had experience in engineering and by mid-2016 the company had its first working prototype ready.
“When all the subsystems went into the vehicle in mid-2016, they were super fresh and new and totally untested. So now when you run the test you can’t easily decipher what is failing. Is the BMS (battery management system) failing in itself? Or, is it the battery causing a BMS failure because of integration issues? Or is it that your architecture is messed up… you just don’t know,” recalls Mehta.
According to him, there were over 600 components going into the vehicle and all of them fresh from development.
“That is when we woke up and realised that you have to give this development process its due respect. This game is not about just ship fast and solve the problems with the batch later.”
Ather had built some vehicles and ran a few of them on the road for about 10,000 km. That gave it data that the studied to understand the problems.
Mehta says, “This is when you start isolating systems and start to truly understand where the failures are happening.” Subsystems, for instance, were prototyped for the first time. “They will have to go through nearly a year worth of iterations before they mature and become more stable.”
Keeping It Alive
According to Mehta, the big challenge that now lay ahead of them was how to not make Ather feel like a boring automotive company keeping the culture and excitement alive while still bringing in the rigour and discipline that you need to get a world-class hardware product out.
“This meant we had to go back to the drawing board for a lot of things. Who put this spec here? Who decided on this thing? And then you start questioning everything,” he says
“Nobody has done this sort of fresh development in recent years. Here its a new technology, completely new platform, new architecture and by a company that has no prior history and people and systems. It was a four-time harder challenge than what we originally thought it was. But then, that is the big opportunity. Not too many people are going to be able to do that again and again,” says Mehta.
The Future
Ather Energy has announced the launch of its third retail outlet in Kerala, scaling up in one of its largest markets after its phenomenal success in Karnataka & Maharashtra.
Ather stands big and tall in the growing space with a DNA going back to research labs, a design built from scratch, and a product that can be traced to custom spec sheets. Will that give it customers and success as a scooter company? Time will tell. But its journey this long is all about learnings, sucker punches, small wins, big bets, uncharted paths, and an early positioning in a market that holds promise.
