From Conviction to Scale: Battery Smart Crosses 100 Mn Swaps
When the GPs at BGV first partnered as investment leads on Battery Smart in 2020, the proposition was far from obvious. Battery swapping for India’s e-rickshaws and two-wheelers had no precedent, no playbook, and little investor appetite. The model was asset-heavy to begin with, and most VCs, thus replicating the Silicon Valley SaaS playbooks for climate investing, stayed away from it. The operations were complex. And thus, industry consensus was firmly against it.
What stood out to us was not the solution but the problem density behind it and the ability of founders to create a solution around it using technology as a moat and an enabler.
Years of operating businesses for MNCs in India across Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns and travelling within the country extensively as well had made one thing clear for BGV GPs: Millions of e-rickshaw drivers and 2-wheeler EV drivers were losing productive hours every day waiting for batteries to charge. Hours lost meant income lost.
This wasn’t a technology gap; it was an infrastructure gap hiding in plain sight.
BatterySmart Founders with Anup in 2020 at the first station in West Delhi.
Battery Smart set out to build a tech-enabled infrastructure that didn’t exist, and to do it patiently.
The long road to scale
The company began with a single station in West Delhi during the early days of COVID, No blitzscaling. No shortcuts. Just daily execution in some of the hardest operating conditions imaginable.
That discipline now reflects in the numbers 6 years down:
- 100 million battery swaps completed.
- 100,000 electric vehicles on the network.
- Presence across 50 cities with 1,600 swap stations deployed.
- Franchisee-led ground operations with commercially motivating payback on Capex.
- Solid Gross Margins, and operations are now EBITDA positive.
- 300,000 battery packs in active circulation.
- SDG goals were delivered too.
Inclusion, climate relevance, and ecosystem impact followed because the fundamentals were sound, not the other way around.
Each metric is the result of cumulative decisions made correctly over time – pricing, utilisation, uptime, city-by-city rollout, and relentless cost control.
What this journey reinforces:
Battery Smart is often described as a climate-tech success. That’s true, but it’s incomplete. At its core, this is a tech-enabled climate infrastructure business built for India:
- Designed for high utilisation, not vanity growth.
- Optimised for driver economics before investor optics.
- Built to survive cycles, not headlines.
