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A Deep Dive into the Future of Commercial EVs | Saurav Kumar (Euler Motors)
385 Plays2 years ago
Saurav Kumar’s journey with Euler Motors is a powerful story of scrappy, first-principles execution.
In this conversation with Akshay Datt, Saurav Kumar, the Founder & CEO of Euler Motors, shares his incredible founder journey. A serial entrepreneur whose previous company Cube26 was acquired by Paytm , Saurav has now raised over $206 million for Euler Motors and is building a manufacturing capacity of 36,000 vehicles per year. The Cornell University alumnus talks about his transition from software to the capital-intensive world of hardware and his mission to electrify India's logistics fleet.
Key Insights from the Conversation:
- The Full-Stack Gambit: Saurav explains why he chose a capital-intensive, vertically integrated model—building vehicles, proprietary batteries, and a charging network—to de-risk EV adoption for customers in a nascent market.
- Customer-Centric R&D: Euler Motors spent its first few years in an intensive pilot phase, deploying hundreds of prototypes with clients like BigBasket and Flipkart to perfect the product based on millions of kilometers of real-world data before the official launch.
- Building a Technology Moat: The core of Euler's competitive advantage lies in its proprietary technology, especially its liquid-cooled battery pack, which was developed specifically to solve the thermal challenges of operating in India's hot climate.
- The "Performance Over Price" Philosophy: The discussion highlights Euler's contrarian strategy of building a more expensive but higher-performing vehicle that offers customers greater "earn-ability" and a superior Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to traditional diesel vehicles.
Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(01:31) From Bihar to Cornell: A Passion for Robotics
(04:03) Why I Couldn't Pursue Robotics in the US
(04:33) The First Startup: Building Cube26 & The Pivot to Hardware
(15:18) A Tough Exit: The Cube26 Acquisition by Paytm
(17:40) The "Why" Behind Euler: Solving India's Pollution Crisis
(22:18) The Core Insight: Why Most Commercial EVs Failed
(25:14) The Scrappy Start: Building an EV Company from a Shed
(33:21) Building a Moat: The Secret to Our Liquid-Cooled Battery
(39:13) Scaling from 100 to 3,000 EVs a Month: The Plan Ahead
YouTube Hashtags
#FounderThesis #SauravKumar #EulerMotors #ElectricVehicles #StartupIndia #MakeInIndia #EV #Entrepreneurship #FounderStory #StartupPodcast #Hardware #Automotive #Logistics #CleanTech #AkshayDatt #VentureCapital #BusinessStrategy
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Transcript
Introduction to Saurabh Kumar & Wider Motors
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, hi, I'm Saurabh Kumar, founder and CEO at Wider Motors.
00:00:16
Speaker
In the last century, there were some key moments when the way the world operated fundamentally changed, which led to the birth of new companies that dominate their category today. Think of a company like Netflix. It was born due to the change in consumer behavior made possible due to the maturity of technology and access to cheap internet. Another such big movement is currently starting as consumers are moving from traditional internal combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles.
00:00:44
Speaker
This has already given us a behemoth like Tesla that is the most valuable car company in the world and it will give us a whole breed of EV companies in India.
Introduction to the Founder Thesis Podcast
00:00:52
Speaker
In this episode of the Founder Thesis Podcast, your host Akshay Dutt is talking with Saurav Kumar, the founder and CEO of Euler, which manufactures commercial electric vehicles. Saurav is a serial founder whose last company was acquired by PTM
00:01:07
Speaker
And in this conversation, he talks about his decade-long journey as a founder and his take on commercial EV space and Euler's plans to dominate the sector.
Educational Journey & Passion for Robotics
00:01:16
Speaker
Stay tuned and follow the Founder Thesis podcast on any audio streaming app to learn how to create a billion-dollar company that dominates its sector.
00:01:31
Speaker
I'm originally from Bihar and actually I was home schooled for a fair bit more of time. There was an organization called Sulu International. They had sponsored my education back then to come up from Bihar to Delhi. I joined DPSR Kepuram in sixth class. Then from DPSR Kepuram, then I went to Delhi College of Engineering.
00:01:50
Speaker
then went to Cornell. So after undergrad at DC, I became very interested in robotics. At the end of the day, robotics is also your maths and physics, all the engineering and everything applied to it. So I actually started liking that a lot. So by the time I moved from Deepya Sargipuram, I was already like, decided to do robotics that was already
First Startup Idea & Smart Devices
00:02:11
Speaker
there. And then
00:02:12
Speaker
When I moved to Delhi College of Engineering, we built a couple of projects around unmanned ground vehicles. So once I came to college, so that is what I looked at as objective, then figured out US is the best place to do something in the part. Actually, I took a year break in between.
00:02:29
Speaker
I was interested in building aerial vehicles. I had applied to a place called Indria in France. So Indria translates to Mathematics and Computing Research Centre, a national computing centre for France. So I went there for a year, six to nine months actually, and there I was working with some of the driverless cars that they were working on with Toyota. So I had meanwhile applied to Cornell before going there. So after I received admission from Cornell, I went to
00:02:57
Speaker
concentrated by masters. There also I worked with the aerial vehicle team, underwater vehicle team. So electric vehicle, it is oil. I think if you think from kid to undergrad to grad, it was building all sorts of electric vehicles. Some could fly, some could go underwater. It's just that at oil we are building like a bigger form factor of vehicles. So that coordinated. There was an ad startup called Mote that I was working on in New York for almost a year.
00:03:24
Speaker
And then I went to Yahoo search in California, worked with them as well for a year and a half or something like that. So there was that entirely two, three places where I had good interaction with the folks in similar area in machine learning and computer vision.
00:03:40
Speaker
So good time spent there, but there was always in back of mind, here in India, Vapashana. Basically, my first start-up was an excuse to come back to India. Smartphone was disrupting the feature phone market here, and we saw a huge opportunity to build something in that space. And I just seized that opportunity and came here, started my first company.
00:04:03
Speaker
What happened to the love for robotics? At that time, when I was graduating in 2011, the robotics job required you to have US citizenships and green card in US. Because of that, almost all robotics companies had a defense contract and there was post 9-11, there was all kinds of things that was built in. So that was where I got stuck. So my love for robotics had to go away because I was not qualifying for anything. Any company that was doing robotics was not there.
00:04:33
Speaker
So 2012, you started your first startup in India? Yes, yes. So you started in US and then came roughly around, I think, 13 early. So one year I struggled in US and then came to. So what was like, tell me the genesis, like what was the idea and did you have savings with you to bootstrap it or how did you get it off the ground?
00:04:55
Speaker
What was these? Why open space you saw because of which you wanted to do this with this? Basically, I mean, I started Q26 with the thought process that most of the, I mean, it started with fonts, but you can expand it to other devices as well, that the feature fonts was getting disrupted. You had more compute power available on the phone.
00:05:15
Speaker
You have different sensors like camera, accelerometers, gyroscope. So there are other sensors that are there. It has compute power. So the thought process was can phone use all of these sensors, can use some of the compute power and be more intelligent rather than being device for texting and calling.
00:05:32
Speaker
So that was like, so interaction piece with the part that I was always fascinated by the way. So while throughout all of this career, big fan of Star Wars, Star well, all of these products, all of, so they don't always push that boundaries of intelligence for you. So as devices we could, I was trying to figure out, can you communicate with them much more?
00:05:51
Speaker
and our devices can communicate to you in a better
Pivot from Hardware to Software
00:05:55
Speaker
fashion. One of the early thing at Webber that we were building is, let's just say you and I are having a conversation, a third person walks into the room, and even if one of them looks at the other person, the other person pauses the conversation, and then let's just say the third person at the first person's interaction finishes, or the third person leaves the room, and then they resume. We built this feature called Lookaway to Pause in the video player for the Android phone.
00:06:21
Speaker
So if you're watching a video and let's just say you look at something and say you're watching and you look at some content that you were consuming would pause and then once you look back it would automatically start playing. Is this a B2B thing that you're building features which app makers can plug into their apps or did you want to actually build apps?
00:06:39
Speaker
So it was, the idea was to power the phone. So whether it's OEM that can integrate it in the gallery app or the video player or a video player company takes it and it takes it. For us, it was more of how do you make phones smarter? And that was how do you make device smarter? That was one line that we had written for ship 26. So that was the thought process. And we meaning you had co-founders in this or you were?
00:07:04
Speaker
Yes, so there were three co-founders, Akash and Abhilik. We all actually were roommates in Silicon Valley. Akash used to work with Oracle, Abhilik used to work with Arista Network, and I was with Yahoo, so we all three were roommates. And we also went to Cornell as well. So we had seen each other, but I had interacted with Abhilik mostly, but we've known each other because of the Indian community over there, but not done much work. Participated in one or two hackathons together, so that was like the most I had done.
00:07:34
Speaker
So whenever I came, so I was originally in New York and then went to Silicon Valley, so these guys were there. So India was the third largest smartphone market factor. Second also, they were China, US and India. These were the only two, three markets that meant something. So in Nashville, then I looked at the way India market was fragmented. There was no sort of carrier control.
00:07:54
Speaker
control over phones. You had micromaxes, carbon, solar, and hours of the world. So that's where we started talking to them figuring out. So I would stay up in the United States to talk to them in India. And then we started, we pissed them this idea that they really liked it. Micromax was the first one to respond to the idea.
00:08:13
Speaker
I remember speaking to the CMO, I think Subhaji. So he gave us that first break in the micromark. So then he said, okay, this seems interesting, but we connect you to Rahul. And Rahul, luckily was at that time, he was traveling to US. I ended up meeting him in US. I showed him the app. So he really liked it. And then he said, let's, let's run it on micromark's phone if it's possible. And we tried to start working with them. So Mia Basha Bilek would spend the night working with
00:08:42
Speaker
Indian timetable because most of the guys are awake in China and would wake up early so that was still better but India was like fairly opposite side so our timetable was completely reversed and so that's when we decided if we have to build this let's go to India and build it.
00:08:58
Speaker
Did you get the Micromax deal? Yeah. We launched, I think it was in one of the Canvas four or something. So I still remember it. So we built integrated and their phone release was like 10, 15 days when we were speaking to them. And it was an immense sort of thing.
00:09:14
Speaker
journey that we, I remember we all were working and they had multiple phones that as we tested everything, temperature, all of that. So we integrated and then we were trying to see the live event if they eventually announced or not. Their entire launch had finished and they had not talked about that feature. So we felt that they had not integrated, but then at the end they had a special sort of discussion about this feature. And I think
00:09:42
Speaker
So that was the beginning. So they integrated, then they followed through in multiple devices, a few lax devices actually shipped with that feature. And that was also our one-on-one into business. So first time you understand about licensing, how do you license these at a support call. And then we started selling other features getting into, so that's where we started getting into features. And then at some point I told them talk
00:10:07
Speaker
original thought was to make devices smarter. This is making things in piecemeal. Let's build the entire smartphone and let's make it smarter. You weren't so far doing all this for primarily micro mics or did you get other clients also? All of them. So over a period of one year, we weren't making true hustlers. So we got almost everyone's hook from all the Indian OEMs like Lava and
00:10:29
Speaker
all the Indian warriors and then we in fact we then there were a couple of folks Vani, Rohit who had also joined when we had started in India and we had a couple of folks that stayed on to build Q26 and my brother Gaurav he also joined the when we came to India from the operations side so it was I mean we that is one thing that I really loved about India is that you had a lot of support fairly quickly on like your
00:10:56
Speaker
Obviously, my dad, I remember, was not very happy when he learned that it was coming from the US to India because he was like, we did everything to assure the US that the technology and things that I was pursuing, he knew that like the US is the only sort of location that would give that kind of, the things that I wanted to do was very limited in India, especially in robotics.
00:11:16
Speaker
So I was not super happy when I told him that I'm coming so early. But at the end of the day, I started supporting in the journey. So it was great that I would say start. But the team also hustled a lot. We were talking about, did we crack rest of the OMC? Yes, we cracked most of the OMC. In fact, we went to China and we cracked a pool pad over there. We worked
00:11:36
Speaker
and they were sold in Chinese market. We were looking at Panasonic as well. So there were a couple of, so a lot of phone company we were able to crack out. But it was always like these meals sort of work. So for some companies would take it for the camera, some would take for the messaging, some would take for different. So we had built different kinds of features where you could make phone smart, but there was no holistic sort of phone which would show all of those things together to the world.
00:12:04
Speaker
And that is where we said, let's build our phone. And that is something I would say that was also an introduction to building hardware. But we said, for phone, let's get into other IoT products. Let's go through our hardware. How do you build hardware? How do you do its quality check? How do you produce them at scale? How do you distribute? How do you sell?
Acquisition by PTM
00:12:26
Speaker
We need to learn all of this. Because if you do the phone and then you end up doing a lot of the other things that are required, then it might not
00:12:34
Speaker
You might not be able to sell the phone as a brand eventually. So we started with smart bulbs. So we looked at devices around you. They thought it's still same making devices smarter. We looked at bulbs and we looked at how do you change the colors, mood, if it's rainy, at day it's going to be a rainy day, evening.
00:12:51
Speaker
Can it give you a different color when you're leaving the home so that you can take an umbrella? So we were trying to push that boundary of like how devices communicate to you. Did you launch the bug and you were planning this as a B2C like your own brand name? Yeah, we did. It has fantastic reviews man. I still remember people wanted last year some of the early investors in
00:13:16
Speaker
They later got to realize that they had used our product from the previous, they never knew that was my previous brand. What was that a brand name or the wish you'd launched? IOTA, IOTA. IOTA basically imaginary number, imagining imaginary sort of re-imagining possibilities, like living in a virtual kind of world. And so IOTA was that thought process where we, and then we renamed it to VROS. Okay. But this was like a D2C thing, like you launched through.
00:13:43
Speaker
Yeah, it was launched on Flipkart and Amazon. That's where Flipkart had also the idea of how Flipkart became an investor so that we can get access to a larger distribution. How do you build a distribution platform? So that is where we were speaking to Flipkart. When did you launch this? Like where the IOTA, the spare two smart devices?
00:14:03
Speaker
So first small one would have been 13, 14, 14 and then Rios was an upgraded version of that 12 and 13, 14, 15. It would be around that time. So yeah, something around 15, I would say. And so Flipkart was your first institutional funding? Yes. So we beat the question.
00:14:21
Speaker
money from working at all those Yahoo and the US and then we started making money through some of the B2B business. However, we worked for Fijitsu and Wipro for different like assignments that would pay the bill for us and in partner we would pursue this thing. So yeah, there was a lot of that time because you spent almost a year and a half without doing getting much of break. But MicroMax definitely started helping generating some of the revenue, helping us grow slowly so that we could
00:14:50
Speaker
build a team of 5-10 people. We had also figured out a way to monetize the devices, help some of the Flipkart and of the world monetize devices in a better way, and the good targeting and advertisement. So those were the worlds that was also brought up. So I had also a good understanding of some of the systems. And that's how Flipkart was one of our customers. And they became interested in what we were doing and that's when they decided to invest in us.
00:15:18
Speaker
And then I remember, I think, at that time, Nishath Vermin used to help Flipkart. So he led the investment. Then he also connected me to Search and Funcell, connected me to Leafix and Tango Global. And then Lee also liked that idea back then of building the devices, ecosystem, and monetization of that eventually. And so that's how that fundraiser actually happened.
00:15:42
Speaker
So we're not looking per se for fundraise. Earlier company was entirely bootstrapped. But Lawrence IoT and everything had come post fundraise, not free. Because with that money, I could think maybe we can go a step further and take a risk toward building a device.
00:15:58
Speaker
So then we thought about the alternate way of working with one of the OEMs in India and basically launched the phone with their support and journey. But then the demonetization had come back then and all of the cash flows and working capital and inventory, everything got stuck for a couple of months. So that was like the final nail in not being able to do hardware and smartphones.
00:16:23
Speaker
And at this time, your B2B revenue was still there. Yeah, B2B we were still doing it. It was always like, so that was, it could not have been significant. Yeah. So it was not significant. There was still revenue coming in. So that's when we had to shut down the hardware division completely. We had to let go of the entire team. And then we pivoted mostly to focus on the software aspect that we were doing.
00:16:48
Speaker
At the end of the ground, and this is like around 2017, when I spoke to PTM, which I share here, and that's when they were interested in acquiring the team and the work that we have done. Like an equitable. Yes. And by end of the year, that was the entire team move of PTM. Almost every investor lost their sort of money in the process. And we could not see a very, I would say, a successful sort of outcome of the 26th journey.
Interest in Pollution Solutions & EVs
00:17:18
Speaker
It was not like I would say the best part of why you start a company. We had already spent, I think, seven, six, six and a half years, seven years building Kube 26. I think we had made tons of mistakes, but we also learned a lot in the process. So that was the, I would say first chapter. So at the end of 2017 is where Kube 26 was acquired by PTM. And I think at that time I was thinking about the X business opportunity. And so.
00:17:46
Speaker
I had a couple of thought process back then to think about and so one was sort of building satellite, constellation of satellite for India and use that for some imaging related activity. The second one was more around the electric vehicle and the idea was obviously in anything that I was picking had a hardware and software component built in and that was mainly because of the background into the different vehicles whether underwater vehicle, aerial vehicle or robotics that I did as a kit.
00:18:15
Speaker
That was how why I was looking for something in the hardware and software space. Even over a period of, I think, as I spent more time with electric vehicles, the idea around obviously India had been doing a lot of work on electric vehicles, almost from 2008, 2009 sort of era. So the questions that I had was mainly in my mind was that the market, there were a lot of like noise and very less signals. There were a few companies that were doing great in two wheelers and a lot of brands talking about the cars.
00:18:44
Speaker
but when the lens from which I was looking at electric vehicle was coming from pollution and air pollution challenge that India was facing and this is also like when I'd come from US and this is 2012, 13, around 13 and spent like five years and before that it was like almost four or five years I was in US. So there was a drastic sort of change in sort of pollution that you certainly
00:19:08
Speaker
it hits you and then it hits you again and again every year. And especially in Delhi where you have that winter smog. Yes, whether it's because of the crop burning or the air stagnation and different issues. So I started looking into wire pollution and also electric vehicle
00:19:25
Speaker
So what I realized that, I mean, India hosts almost like 18 to 19 top most polluted cities globally. And then within all of these cities, and even globally that I saw, air pollution, 40% of them roughly was because of air-cooler pollution.
00:19:40
Speaker
And then within that, I saw that in vehicular pollution, commercial vehicles are like one of the biggest sort of contributors of the air pollution. Two wheeler was also coming in close. But India had a lot of companies working in the two wheeler space. So I started looking at the commercial vehicle, but people are doing it that space. That was obviously one lens. But then I also like, because I'd built that prior company Q26, I started also looking at from the sort of economics point of view, because
00:20:09
Speaker
People at the end of the day want to buy a vehicle. They don't care whether it's electric or nuclear powered or CNG powered. At the end of the day, it's more around the experience that they want with the vehicle. So in that experience, what we realized
00:20:24
Speaker
was as long as, and this is more so true with commercial, but in general, when we saw what are the total sort of kilometer, somebody tribes in a day, what is the cost of operation? Where will they charge? How much time will it take for them to charge if they're doing at
00:20:40
Speaker
home if they're doing it at a charging station. So we looked at all the things that are responsible for making a vehicle work. The entire system, your financing, your servicing, your charging station, and the sort of the supplier that is required. And then you look at the theme, then you look at the competition, that as you're building, there will be players coming from China and will wipe you out, like in the phone industry, like India had a lot of Indian OEMs trying
00:21:07
Speaker
to build smartphones and then suddenly you had OPPO viewers of the world coming in at us who had advantage of scale and price point and they came in and disrupted the entire India mobile phone with huge amount of marketing. So look from all the angle and pollution at the center of it and realize here commercial vehicles there are very less players that are focused on this.
00:21:28
Speaker
and this is a segment where total cost of ownership which is TCO makes immediate amount of sense because the vehicle utilizations are very high so at the end of the day people care about vehicle right and so let's just say cargo vehicle that oiler is currently building then the performance criterias are born around
00:21:46
Speaker
What kind of payload it will carry? If you have an overloading scenario, will it work? The placements have a very different gradients than the flyover. So will it be able to climb any kinds of placements?
Founding Euler Motors
00:21:57
Speaker
What about hilly region? These vehicles are used even in fields in rural areas. So will it perform well in those? So it's a combination of everything that sort of a vehicle has to undergo. If you want the transition to electric to happen, then the vehicle has to be at par or superior in performance
00:22:15
Speaker
than the diesel-led CNG vehicles of the world. Most vehicle in commercial that we saw in 2018 were sub-par vehicles. Whether you look at like the e-ricks in passenger or some cargo experiments or even some of the other cargo experiments people were, other brands were doing, they all were like sub-par vehicle. And that was a big sort of question for me as well. Why are these people building like this? And the answer was very simple that I received. So there were two trajectories that I saw. One was,
00:22:43
Speaker
By definition, when you make an EVs, I mean, it's a bit costlier than the IC engines of the world in terms of cost. So most people we saw were taking approach where they were building the vehicle for the price segment that a particular product represented. So if you have a three wheeler that comes in a two lakhs or a band, then people were trying to build an electric vehicle also in that price band itself. So that customer does not see the burn of it.
00:23:09
Speaker
that was leading to a subpar electric vehicle and hence your transition was getting slow because the drivetrain of an EV is inherently costly so if you want to be able to achieve the same prices to then compromise on other features basically exactly so that's where we
00:23:24
Speaker
the biggest product sort of fallacy is what we understood which market was doing that they were trying to look at EV at the same price lens of an ICE and by doing that we're making an inferior sort of vehicle and because of that the customer expectations were not getting much and the whole experience was going for a toss. What oiler did was we said Kia or Teko you cannot
00:23:45
Speaker
people at the end of the day want a product and the associated sort of benefits are not changing just because the way these electrics are really I would not say here I'll start delivering lesser number of cylinder or a bakery whatever they are using the way for their uses is constant they are mostly going to use the replace the existing in the same way right so
00:24:05
Speaker
What we did is we mapped those use cases and we made sure that the vehicles are matching in performance. The price went out but because of the saving that you have, because of the pure nature of the low cost of operation, overall saving you still get because you have a low running cost. We put a rule that anything that we do, our TCO should match in our year, year and half. I think that was a good
00:24:29
Speaker
that we wrote for ourselves in terms of how we think about product, how we think about building, sort of getting into a new segment. And that's how we started building the brand. Setting up a vehicle manufacturing business, it is inherently high capex. I mean, you would need a lot of money right from the get-go. You understood, okay, we need to create an EV which matches IC in TCO, total cost of ownership, instead of the one-time price which somebody's paying for it. So from this insight,
00:24:57
Speaker
to actually launching your first vehicle. Tell me that journey. Did you get the capital together? How did you get the know-how in place? Are there some sort of government regulatory norms that you needed to cross to get the license to sell vehicles? All of those behind the scenes things, that's what I want to hear.
00:25:14
Speaker
Obviously, it would be fair to say that when I started, I wasn't aware of the complexity of the entire business. Had I been aware, I think I would have probably, even though I would have thought more. But so it was also like, you know, sometimes you say that ignorance is bliss. And I think the idea was very exciting. And I could see that as a kid, like some of the things that I've worked on in robotics and on vehicles, and then the purpose of the train doing this, right.
00:25:42
Speaker
The idea was not to only think about the monetary benefit at the end. I mean, it was leading to like, can I fix some of the accelerate the transition to EVs? And I think if we could do part of that in some segments, a lot of other PM will come and maybe it won't fix all of your problem. Maybe it just moves a needle and we need a lot of people to fix that needle. It's the kind of solution problem that we are in. It's like, it needs a lot of effort. But the initial capital, you would still need a manufacturing setup.
00:26:11
Speaker
So yeah, so I had invested my own whatever personal wealth that I had generated over a period of from the PTM sales. PTM and then also US. So when I was there, has been saved and that I had. So that obviously that I had put in. Then there was some one angel that had come very early on was one of our customers for my previous company, one of the longest sort of customer.
00:26:34
Speaker
And I discussed that idea after like the sale, that here I'm thinking about this, and then I continue to take this guidance. And then one day it was like, oh, this is interesting. I would like to put up the once a year. That was the first check that kind of afloat that 2018. So he had ended up investing like close to 1.5, 1.8 CR, I think. He said that he can put in up to four. Then I said, hey, this is going to be super risky. I don't want four. Let me take like one.
00:27:04
Speaker
I'll take some more. So I think we ended up paying 1.8 and then I was speaking to all the venture capital, all the investors in India globally. So you basically just need one, yes, almost one sort of, I think we spoke to, I think it was Blue Venture that said, yes, I think they literally took the bet when like no one could understand what it would become.
00:27:29
Speaker
And almost everybody had said no. It was that entire sort of one-year journey in which we first took vehicles from some other company because the idea was trying to prove that a three-wheeler cargo would work for an e-commerce. So we said, let's find out what's available in markets. Let's see what are the challenges. So we did that for three months and we realized the vehicle is not great.
00:27:50
Speaker
You took a vehicle and then what? You were having a logistics business, like you were doing? It was through understanding. Because at the end of the day, our customer was going to be a logistics provider who will either end customer or a logistics player. So we said, if we have to sell it to them, let's become them. So we said, let's become them with their journey so that we understand what challenge they're going to face.
00:28:11
Speaker
So that is your primary. You become your customer and then you live that journey. So we picked that and then we took a vehicle from somebody in market. We took battery from someone, we assembled some of the already running vehicle that we just replaced some of the things. And then we ran it, I think, at that point with Grow First was the first customer.
00:28:31
Speaker
The pilot said he was kind enough to help me with the pilot and then we ran it. We did more experiments with Micromax and some of these guys back then in pilot day to realize what to build, what not to build, because you build everything if you would really want to, but the answer lies in saying no to a lot of things. So we realized the battery, the electronics, these are the important parts that you need to build over a period of time. Everything else in there is good.
00:28:59
Speaker
It's I think partnering with the right companies over there and you can partner with them and build your business around that. That was one learning. Then we obviously we started building our own product. I don't think we had a line or anything back then. There was this vendor and we talk about it internally a lot. So they used to make these e-rickshore for a lot of the Indian players. So they were back-end manufacturer for the big SOP OEM.
00:29:24
Speaker
So we ended up like working with them. So like we used to sit in there after we didn't have any developers or engineers or whatever you say, it was the first in the team as well while thinking about. So I had assembled a couple of people, but there was that engineer.
00:29:39
Speaker
So we split up this manufacturing company and then I would hand draw things and there was a person who was kind enough to like convert it in CAD, the things that I used to tell him. And this is also like where I was telling Akshara, like the passion for engineering was always there. So that's something that I enjoyed anyway. So it was not something that I was feeling here, like I have to go in the morning to do it. Like I would very happily go there.
00:30:04
Speaker
And this is a factory where you don't have air-conditioned and stuff like, but still super, super happy. So we spent time over there building the chassis with them. We saw a lot of, because they were also building a lot of vehicle for other companies. So you could take inspiration also very quickly.
00:30:20
Speaker
And then they had this extra space in their own factory, which was like for scrap and garbage and different thing. So we had got that cleaned and we started to, they didn't charge us any money for it, but that's where we actually started doing the
00:30:35
Speaker
first sort of vehicle assembly for our own pilots and this is like pure like land there is there's just a shade and so it would so we would take their tools in the night and best part was that i was blessed with like couple of people who were there like even even if it killed two three o'clock four o'clock we used to just do some welding testing and make just the testing the vehicle because
00:30:57
Speaker
We were literally on ground trying to build these vehicles, test it. And it's like a well sort of area. So you also didn't have like very great roads. So you could actually test out and figure out all the issues that you're going to face. That's ran for like almost six months, early part of 2018. When the first Injis check came, I took the first 5,000 square feet factory in Frida
Scaling Manufacturing & Investment
00:31:19
Speaker
world. Again, there's no fancy, no air conditioner. And every time in summer, like you had these heat waves. So it used to be very terrible sort of phase.
00:31:27
Speaker
So we took the first factory. So there it was mainly assembly. So the supplier used to supply the chassis and cabinets and then bodies. And then we would try. I had, because of my previous experience, I was there who was also a heading of operation at Q26, could access an understanding of the China and Taiwan. So we could figure out the early electronics and components that are required for batteries and some of those things from there.
00:31:55
Speaker
And then we started some of the early assembly in terms of figuring out what components are required, whether it's motor or controller. So right now, no engineering at such a good level. It's mainly, I would say, you bring things and you put them together to check a product that you can actually test it on the ground.
00:32:16
Speaker
So this was like basically an MVP in a way. So what happened by end of the year, like I'll tell you, the end what we had was around 20 vehicles on the ground, which were running for two, three e-commerce companies. We ended up putting up around five to 10 charging stations, which was again on rental. So as we were running these vehicles, our understanding was updating also. The charging station we created, we went to need some space to make those charging stations.
00:32:44
Speaker
because we owned everything so we could change things at a very high speed. That's how I think the first part and then Bloom saw that potential that that e-commerce is growing. We've been able to do at least something on ground and by then I think this is like end of the year when Bloom had come in but I've been speaking to Karthik throughout the year I think from June, July when he was talking to them or maybe a bit prior to them and I think eventually
00:33:09
Speaker
happened in near Diwali, and I think by February, they had widened the capital next year. So in that way, we had also fully understood what are the things we will do. And then we had an early work done on the battery pack, because battery was what we understood was the single most important thing. So I ended up spending a lot of time on battery with a lot of people globally in India, figuring out what are the things that are going to happen.
00:33:38
Speaker
And because of the pilots that was running, right, and majority of our time was spent during the summers of that 2018, that realization around heat and challenges around your battery issues, around whether it's poor BMS and some of these things, I had that understanding firsthand. So our focus on liquid cooling of battery power started. I think that's where some of our core today IP stands because those are the things
00:34:04
Speaker
that we saw first time. Battery, by end of the year we had set up a small lab where we were making like one battery pack in two, three days. So we are not deploying like more than like you deployed 20 vehicle in an entire year. So not making like hundreds of battery pack per day or something. You're doing like five days may eight. So you could slowly test, build out and then
00:34:25
Speaker
So that was my first year and almost every year since then has been, I would say, just a bit better version of what I've told you. But every year, one investor would come and say boiler. Then by next year was inventors capital. I think I met Ruthvik, I think through an introduction by an investor that works, investor in Cube 26. So they had to do stuff together.
00:34:49
Speaker
And then Druth had come over, he saw some of the work that we have been doing and the product. And by then, like we had built around, this is a year later, so some hundred, 160 vehicles were running on ground and had shown some of the early prototypes of liquid cooling battery pack. Then our vehicle also, because of the hundreds of vehicle, we also were able to understand what would be a right form factor of vehicle. So we tested our product with
00:35:15
Speaker
B2B companies, B2C, groceries, we understood all kinds of payload requirements, speed requirements, and your cargo box and everything. So that is what I mean, built in that next sort of product. He really liked what we were doing when I met Samir at the IC. And I remember calling from Bloom before IC key, what are the things I should talk about? And he said, you like technology a lot. You should probably talk about technology the most. I think that's it.
00:35:45
Speaker
with everything else investor has to take a gut feeling and a bet that this should.
00:35:51
Speaker
And I think that advice really worked out well. And Rudvik comes with a product experience background. So he stood up a lot of questions around tech in that IC meeting. Obviously, business and everything was definitely there. Again, they were like, I had spoken to around 30, 40 of investors that year. I remember for Series 8, this is 2019. Inventors OK had come at the end of the year, I think around December or something November. And January, I think we ended up signing term sheets.
00:36:19
Speaker
So yes, it was like one cluster out of that entire pool. Otherwise, so Bloom would probably would have to turn a bridge or we would have shut the shop. One quick question before that. In a regular IC vehicle, does that engine change? Because the IC engine has this explosion which moves the piston up and down. How is a battery-driven engine different from a patrol-driven engine?
00:36:43
Speaker
And how did you source the engine, like the drivetrain part of the vehicle? Was that also provided by a local vendor or was that imported? Does India have an ecosystem of companies who will provide you that engine? That seems like the core part of building a vehicle. Everything else you could probably find vendors and assemble. So the concepts are similar, but here instead of engine, you have motor, which is an induction motor, like a pump, like a water pump you have. A pump or a pack that you have.
00:37:08
Speaker
So induction motor India has been building like over a period of time. The major IRPs are more around the vehicle control unit, the motor controller, the battery pack. These are the core areas where we focus our motors, some of these things. We designed these stators and rotor, but I'm telling from today.
00:37:25
Speaker
But we eventually outsourced this to a Japanese-based OEM who makes it for us and then provides us these different components which we take internally, assemble them together to make the model and integrate our gearbox and everything to make the entire drivetrain. Then we integrate your all the electronics battery pack to make the powertrain.
00:37:44
Speaker
So essentially, motor, per se, is not a challenge to solar. It's just like a motor of any other's electric device. I think the more interesting things that people have been doing around is the control of motor, the efficiency. The one engine to the other, the betterment comes from that additional mileage. And so here also,
00:38:06
Speaker
How efficient is your motor in converting the electrical energy to mechanical energy? And I think that's where the majority of internally and with our vendor goes into that. How do I go max amount of range on a single unit of charge? So that's the end game that you're trying to solve.
00:38:24
Speaker
Because at the end of the day, we don't really care about what's inside to a greater degree. What they care more is the experience that's around the vehicle. That key, when this is the payload it can take, this is the range it will go. These are the boundaries in which the vehicle has to go. So the challenge is essentially taking all those components and putting them together in a highly optimized manner so that they work well with each other. Got it. Okay. Okay. Okay.
00:38:50
Speaker
So yeah, let's continue the journey, the series. How much did you raise in that series? It was 10 million. I think roughly around 10 million. By the 2020, one Asian development bank had also come in. So we had spent time with them toward the end of the last year. And we have been fortunate in the sense that a lot of investors have taken a bet on us. And also, every time there have been a new set of investors coming in and taking a bet on the bigger. So what is your current state of manufacturing? How does your vehicle get built at Euler today?
00:39:20
Speaker
Tell me that whole process, like from the raw material to the final vehicle driving out. Yeah. So today, I mean, we're still like very limited because so far we have only raised like around 25, 27 million. So we have a fairly limited amount of capital to invest factory. So we have an integrated facility right now where all your manufacturing, R&D, sales service, everyone sits together in a large office.
00:39:46
Speaker
Today your vehicle, when you talk about the raw material, so if you look at the chassis cabin and the press welding and then painting, all of that is outsourced. So we have outsourced it to a couple of vendors in India. We have given them the designs, we have made the tooling with them.
00:40:02
Speaker
and they would do the entire BIW integration, BIW's body in white integration process, so they would make the entire body chassis cabin, weld them together, weld them and ship it to our facility here in Delhi, then trip back we make internally, so sales would come from some of the vendor in Taiwan and then in China, Korea,
00:40:23
Speaker
Then we would take cells from multiple of these vendors. Then there are components that are taken from Indian vendors related to aluminums, boxes, wire harnesses, a lot of those things. Some of the electronics comes from European vendors, so we work with them on some of the key electronics. Some we make ourselves well in the battery pack. Then all that manufacturing of battery pack happens internally at our factory. So we
00:40:47
Speaker
take any battery from outside in our vehicles. It's all 100% oiler. Then all your instrument cluster, all of those electronics also oiler designs it. There are SMT facilities in India who would make these and then give us the PCB chip. So we would work with some of the
00:41:05
Speaker
tier one chip companies like your SD or NXP or LTC, and then work with the SMP vendor or the PC, then you will assemble all of the electronics and now the software is all controlled. So your major idea that we had understood back then like the software, the electronics, the battery, all of that are under control. The only part that we don't control is like today we've also all of the painting, welding,
00:41:30
Speaker
press all the parts and at this point of time, we are looking to set up like the bigger factory that can do 3000 vehicle in a month capacity. That's something that Euler is currently working on setting up. Okay. And what is your current production? Like how many vehicles a month?
00:41:48
Speaker
100. Okay. Okay. So that's a massive job. Okay. 100 to 3000. Wow. Okay. So it's basically a function of the space and the bit of automation that we are doing. Currently we are going to go from 100 to 300 in next three months. That's with the current facility and a couple of facilities that we have taken nearby. But the larger facility that we are setting up will do 3000 vehicles in a single
EV Adoption in Delhi
00:42:13
Speaker
month. So what do you think will be the challenges?
00:42:16
Speaker
like 100 to 3000 that doing that journey. You must have got some sort of a roadmap in mind on what are the things to get right? What is in your checklist there's things to get right? One of the things that we have done has been on the proto sort of level. So obviously they're in for engineering challenge. So we are continuing to rise because our competition is ourselves like the vehicle that we have produced or the one that we launched last year. So in October, we first cargo vehicle, high oiler, high load.
00:42:44
Speaker
the IC variants that are out there. Our major competition is the IC engines of the world. We would want as many electric vehicles, so we don't compete with that. At least in our mindset, our main competition is the IC engines of the world. So if you put an oiler high-load, it will beat every IC vehicle that is out there. And when I say beat, whether you do payload capacity, gradient, or you do tug-of-war, whatever you do, it is better than anybody else. And what is the range? So this is like your
00:43:13
Speaker
You have only one product today, the high-load EV, three-wheel high-load. There are a couple more that will come along the way, but yeah, today is just one. But this is your flagship product. Okay. Tell me about the flagship product. If you were to pitch the product to me as a logistics operator, what would be your pitch? So when we pitch, I think the thing that we speak mainly about is
00:43:33
Speaker
that this vehicle is superior in your performance and efficiency and design than any ICE. Other than government and everybody focused on moving to electric, our pitch mostly talks about how they're going to earn more. So the payload capacity of our vehicle is, for instance, 688 kg, which is roughly 40% more
00:43:51
Speaker
than any ICE engine vehicle, so their earning potential goes up by 40%. Because of electric nature, that is obviously as compared to a diesel, which would probably walk at 3 rupees per kilometer. CNG would be at 1.5 to 2 rupees per kilometer.
00:44:06
Speaker
your electric is your 60 pass up per kilometer. So with a higher 20% cost, the earning potential is 40% more, and then saving reduction as you're going from three rupees to 60 pass up per kilometer. So anything upfront that the customer ends up paying the first set of like a year, it goes out in operational saving within a year. So that's mostly where it becomes a win-win. So they can, without thinking, they can replace their fleet.
00:44:35
Speaker
And what is the lane? For a single charge currently, it does 120 kilometers on ground. So government certified range at like 150 kilometers. So on a single charge, which is these vehicles come with a liquid cooled battery pack. So they can also get fast charging done from our fast charging center. So in 15 minutes, there's a 50 kilometer fast charging option available. And I think that's one of the things that we realized that while people will charge these vehicles at home in a sort of a
00:45:04
Speaker
a three-pin plug where they can overnight charging. In four hours, five hours, it will charge the entire vehicle. If some of the customers we have seen that also drives 150 kilometers in a day, so they would do like a 15-minute pass charging at our station and then they're less worried about anything.
00:45:21
Speaker
And this fast charging infra that you're setting up, this is again a revenue generation source for you, like you monetize this or? Free. We have kept it free because we cared more about the adoption, but over a period of time, we will work about both ways of inter-putability, as in how can we make sure that oiler vehicles can charge that other charging station? And similarly, how can other vehicle can come and use oiler charging station?
00:45:46
Speaker
Like what is the percentage of adoption of EVs today? Like in, let's say just this logistics operator business, like out of every hundred vehicles sold, what percentage are EVs and what percentage are I see? So actually, if you look at pan India, forget about logistics, if you look at just the cargo vehicle where oil is operating, if you look at overall to be a three-wheeler cargo, which is L5. So when we look at the penetration pan India, it's roughly 12
00:46:15
Speaker
The new vehicle that are happening is already electric. If you look at the E 3 wheeler cargo, it's roughly more than 50% of the vehicle that are being sold today in 3 wheeler cargo is already electric. And these are like, I'm talking about the e-rickshaws of the world, I'm talking about 3 wheeler cargo. So percentage wise, if you think, Delhi has already had the tipping point.
00:46:36
Speaker
50% sales up. I think Karnataka was the second one where I had seen that they were around 25-26% or maybe a bit more here, so more than 20%. In India, we have seen around 12% electrification already happening in the three wheeler car. So this year, I think India will probably look at more than 20% than India level electrification. This is impressive. I think even at last, the US and the West would not be hitting 50% so soon, right?
00:47:05
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so what drove that hitting the tipping point in Delhi? Was it charging interest? Was it government subsidy? Like from a macro perspective, what's driving this? The Delhi government has done a lot of work. The Delhi subsidy, whether you talk about the no entry restriction, moving of that, then the moving of operational limits for the vehicle, then the authentic
00:47:27
Speaker
Oh, so for IC, there is a cargo vehicle's content between I think 8am to 8pm. Some restriction is there in Delhi. So EVs are exempt from that. Exactly. So they exempted EVs from that. So that was an operational sort of benefit. And so these were used to be a pitch to the main, by the way, guys, that you can do three trips in a day. Or if somebody was doing one trip, you can do two trips.
00:47:49
Speaker
This is an operational benefit. Then physical incentives would make obviously you're removing of some of the taxes on registration, pollution and some goals. And then other than that, giving that 30,000 subsidy on top of the vehicle purchase. And that brings us to the end of this conversation.
00:48:04
Speaker
I want to ask you for a favor now. Did you like listening to the show? I'd love to hear your feedback about it. Do you have your own startup ideas? I'd love to hear them. Do you have questions for any of the guests that you heard about in the show? I'd love to get your questions and pass them on to the guests. Write to me at ad at the podium dot in. That's ad at t h e p o d i u m dot in.