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Niraj Rajmohan & Narayan Subramaniam are revving up innovation, from garage to global | Ultraviolette Automotive
163 Plays7 months ago
We’re living in the golden age of automobiles when they’re shifting from gas-guzzlers to clean, cool electric vehicles (EVs). This shift is creating room for new iconic brands to emerge. One such future iconic brand is the performance EV bike-maker Ultraviolette Automotive whose EV bike F77 has been turning heads. In this episode, Niraj Rajmohan and Narayan Subramaniam talk about their journey of building Ultraviolette as a globally aspirational motorcycle brand out of India.
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Read more about Ultraviolette:-
3.Ultraviolette: Racing into global markets with F77
4.EV firms focussed on high-tech products need more support: Ultraviolette founders
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Transcript
Introduction and Background of Ultraviolet
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi Akshay, thank you for having us over. I'm Miraz Ajman, one of the founders of Vultra landed.
Evolution of Automotive Industry: ICE to Electric
00:00:17
Speaker
Think of any icon brand names in the two-wheeler space, like say, Harley-Davidson, Ducati, Honda, Yamaha, Royal Enfield. You know what's common among them all? They are all at least 50-year-old brands. But right now, we are in the golden age of automobiles, an age when the industry is fundamentally shifting from the fuel-guzzling internal combustion engine to electric engines. And this is the exact moment when we will see the next generation of iconic brands being
Founders' Journey: Competition and Education
00:00:43
Speaker
born.
00:00:43
Speaker
One such future iconic brand is the performance EV bike maker Ultra Violet, whose EV bike, F77, has been turning heads and dropping jaws. In this very special episode of the Foundathesis Podcast, your host Akshay Dutt has a freewheeling candid conversation with Neeraj Raj Mohan and Narayan Subramanyam about the amazing journey of building Ultra Violet as a globally aspirational motorcycle brand out of India. Stay tuned.
00:01:19
Speaker
And I'm Marayan, and I'm on ultraviolet wavelength, the future of mobility with my focus on design and tech. So, Neerajit Nayan, tell me like your backstories before you guys got together to start ultraviolet.
00:01:36
Speaker
So our journey goes back long way, perhaps spanning over two decades. Nina and I went to the same school. We were competitors during our time at school. We went to the same university as well where competition turned to collaboration and across four years of our time at engineering, we
00:01:55
Speaker
I think what excited us was going beyond the syllabus, trying to find new problems to solve and this led us to take part in multiple creative design and engineering competitions across the IITs, the NITs, IIT Mumbai has an event called the Tech Fest, IIT Madras has something called the Shastra.
00:02:15
Speaker
These competition breeds required us to solve problems by building robots, helicopters, aircraft summaries, amphibious vehicles, and whatnot. So I think over four years, we ended up winning over 40 odd competitions. Neeraj, do you recall the exact number there? Yeah, so we don't actually have the number. It was way more than 40. But in the early days, we forgot to collect the certificates. We were more excited about the pricing.
00:02:45
Speaker
And we were just excited to get that and then head out to the party. But what was sort of interesting is in the early days, we would do these kind of like crazy experiments where we would win first place or it was nothing. It was nowhere in the middle.
00:03:04
Speaker
Right. It was all or nothing.
Career Influences and the Birth of Ultraviolet
00:03:06
Speaker
And then when we started to do this over and over again, we realized there is a certain skill or there's some bit of, you know, creativity and skill coming together to make this happen. And from then on, it was just consecutive wins after the other, right. And all of these competitions and to the point where the organizers knew that if we were there, you know, most likely the first place would be us. Approach Neeras talks about is the core of it is being disruptive.
00:03:34
Speaker
Right? If there is an incremental solution that wouldn't excite us and it was, like you said, try something new and either it's a fabulous success or even more fabulous failure in that sense. So what did you guys do after your BTEC? So this was time of the days where
00:03:55
Speaker
The commission options were engineering or medicine. And I think through my four years, I figured that I want to be in the creative domain. So took some time off post, BTEC figured out, I want to get into the world of automobile design. And prepared to go into MID, National Institute of Design at Amazon. It was a two-year program. Worked with multiple companies on various projects. Worked with Minds Up Two Wheelers, probably while at Pune.
00:04:24
Speaker
and post this I mean the choice for me was to join the industry as a designer but I was sort of disappointed that the ecosystem of the industry in India is more of a follower mindset and not a innovator or a trendsetter for that matter and the real real innovation and the trends were being set by the east or the west and we have been captured correctly man that did not excite me and I didn't want to spend the
00:04:53
Speaker
time of my career, you know, facelift culture, right? So, I went to Sweden to Ummio Institute of Design to pursue another Masters, got into Royal College of Art in London, it was between London and Sweden. I think for me, at that point, both were great universities, but the
00:05:12
Speaker
What excited me was to go outside of my comfort zone. This was a town very close to the Arctic Circle with about a population of just about 45-50,000 people and I'm probably the only person from India.
00:05:28
Speaker
100 kilometer radius, right? So, winters that are eight months, sunlight of two hours a day. So all of this really, really fascinated me. And one of the reasons, of course, I got a scholarship, their 100% scholarship, which made things a lot more accessible from the program itself.
00:05:47
Speaker
And this program is quite unique. All of our projects are with the companies based out of Europe. And I continued this culture of taking part in design competitions. I won the move awards in Europe in 2030. I was then incidentally in Japan for the meta part of 2013, working with both the Hatsu and Osaka, post which I went to Volkswagen. Like a life project or something like that.
00:06:15
Speaker
Yes, yes. So I was a concept designer by working on a concept car. And I mean, as you know, that was in the K car segment in Japan. So very interesting, very different problems to solve for me from the automobile interior perspective. Very interesting. I think one of my most memorable strengths as in my career thus far is that that phase in Japan.
00:06:40
Speaker
exposure to new culture, new way of lifestyle and work and high energy all around. And I think that's what really excited me.
00:06:49
Speaker
and post this, went to Germany, worked at Volkswagen at Wolfsburg at the headquarters, again worked on a few four wheeler projects while there. And by then it was about 2014 and Neelaj and I had always been in touch. I think when he gets into his journey, he's going to give you a bit of other project that people are part of post engineering as well.
00:07:14
Speaker
And we've been following the success of Tesla and we knew the, I mean, we'd been working with Jutima and marketing since 2003 or 2004, right from our base. And we could see the larger companies have a lot of baggage and legacy and
00:07:30
Speaker
While this was a strong point for the past few decades, it became an innovator to innovation or transition in the new era of mobility, right? And I think that prompted me to take the leap, come back to India and get started with a few experiments that ultimately more script towards un-travelic history. Yeah, that's a fairly elaborate description of my career path. And what about you guys? What did you do after your BTEC?
00:07:59
Speaker
So my journey has been kind of intertwined with Narayan's journey at various points. I was always this geeky kid who liked to write code and started programming at a very young age.
00:08:15
Speaker
to the point which is, you know, before taking up engineering itself, I sort of had gone through the entire syllabus and had a fair sense of, you know, programming, C, C+, and all of these things, right? So this was the days when we were on Hotmail, and I think we were in fifth or sixth grade. And I was talking to my parents about Meeraj, and they wouldn't believe me. And then he hacked my back, so email. And then suddenly, everyone was looking at this whole nut differently.
00:08:45
Speaker
Yeah, so this was, there was a sort of facilitation of computers and electronics all throughout, right. And even before getting into engineering, I had taken up electronics to study because I completed the entire computer science syllabus, right, even not what we call after the 10th, 11th and 12th. So studied electronics and then got back into computer science for the undergrad sort of course, right. And throughout the entire course, while
00:09:13
Speaker
Programming was a core part of my sort of learning because I was so obsessed with that. I was also seeking out other areas and that's why we ended up in these all these competitions and no robotics and all of these things. Right. So by the end of engineering,
00:09:29
Speaker
What had happened is that I'd gotten a pretty amazing offer to join Yahoo, right? It was in the heydays of Yahoo, and pretty exciting also was there. And at the same time, my interest was there in hardware. So I joined Yahoo in Bangalore. I was chuckling between Bangalore and their campus in California. And also, at the same time, was tinkering with hardware drones, all of that. So by the time I was in my second year at Yahoo,
00:09:58
Speaker
Again, started working on weekends and RIN was also involved. Got back in 2009, started thinking about a startup which worked on autonomous drones, working on the limitations of drones. Drones and quadcopters and these UAVs have a lifetime of about 40 minutes. So the idea was that is a limitation. How do we make energy more easily accessible such that these things can be in the air all the time? So quick Yahoo to pursue this full-time actually in 2010.
00:10:28
Speaker
It was a little ahead of its time in terms of not the tech, but the idea that, you know, I could start a company and do something like this. I think Narayan was also involved. He was in different parts of the world. We were collaborating on all these things. Realized that it wasn't just the tech that is going to be needed to solve some very hard problems like this. And that's when I decided, even though I'm a very technical sort of
00:10:53
Speaker
sort of tech-focused person I decided to study, do a master's degree in business, right? And that's when I went to AIM in Manila, Philippines. So spent two years in Philippines, completed my MBA, came back to Bangalore, but wanted to get back into technology. The idea was always that, you know, at some point,
00:11:15
Speaker
We're going to end up starting a venture. We should know how to run a business. We should have the basics of business in place. And whatever it takes to build a business, that should also be there. While innovation is tech and tech is at the core, it must run as an independent business.
00:11:31
Speaker
So came back to India, worked with another value-based company while my student loans were being paid off. This was NetApp. Again, it was an exciting opportunity. I was working with what is called the Advanced Technology Group. There were about 50 postdoctoral researchers, PhDs in different parts of the world.
00:11:53
Speaker
And my job was to commercialize their ideas. Right? So fast forward that to, I think around the time when Narayan and I again, we were reconnected. Narayan was thinking about coming back to India and 2015, late 2015, I had also by then started another company and we sort of reconnected and Narayan. This is here now, the other company started. And what were you doing there?
00:12:16
Speaker
So here now, I started with a colleague of mine from NetApp. So the idea here was that smartphones had already become quite prevalent in our society. But there was still some problems that hadn't been solved in terms of we had social networks, we had hyper-local apps and all of that. And our idea was to enable connections between people who didn't know each other but who shared a common experience or a common location.
00:12:45
Speaker
So here now was intended to connect with people who previously did not know each other, but, you know, have some shared interest. And we sort of started to scale that in Bangalore group about, I remember correctly about from 10, 20,000 users, right? And we also realized it's going to take time to scale, right?
Experimentation and Focus on Performance Motorcycles
00:13:03
Speaker
This was, I think we realized the certain limitations of that we didn't want to pivot into sort of turning it into a local commercial app.
00:13:12
Speaker
We wanted the community to grow, but there are certain limitations to that. And along the way, I think it was a difficult journey and we realized that, you know, all of the founders have different interests and that's when, you know, I started thinking about what do we do next.
00:13:29
Speaker
And our end, you know, I'd already started working on various aspects of what was become ultraviolet. And I think formally we started ultraviolet in December, 2015, January, 2016. Right. And what was the, I mean, were you clear that you want to do a two-wheeler form factor and an electric vehicle or did that clarity come along the way?
00:13:55
Speaker
The whole phase of what Neeraj mentioned in 2015 was experimenting. So I think at that point we
00:14:06
Speaker
We were evaluating different products, different markets, figuring out the product market fit, the kind of team that we would need to build, benchmarking other companies and saying what it's taken for. Two-wheeler and four-wheeler manufacturers to get to a certain group of concept and kind of scale. So we looked at micromobility, single-wheel, self-balancing vehicles.
00:14:29
Speaker
hybrid bicycles, pedonic segments, we looked at scooters, we looked at performance vehicles, we looked at four wheelers, so we looked at the entire spectrum and I think we built out proof of concept for at least three of these subcategories in that one year. So one year was I think four of us
00:14:48
Speaker
logging maybe 16, 18 hours a day and crazy hacky solutions to build out different POCs. And I think what we realized was we, in between a few investors, we figured your product is for a certain market, it makes sense to be located there. And by which time we went to a certain norm.
00:15:09
Speaker
traction with the team here in Bangalore. And if you have to narrow down to looking at India first and then pending a global company as an extension of that, the challenge of the electric vehicle, we went down to the deepest near and that near was the emotional or the perception of electric vehicles, right? The perception
00:15:34
Speaker
I think largely due to the low quality vehicles that have been imported in the country was not that great. And I think if we had to make a long run English industry, it meant first we tackled the problem of perception, which means the first product to build out needs to have a very strong emotional pull. It cannot be a utility segment and which is why
00:15:55
Speaker
We narrowed down to the motorcycle segments. I mean cars would have taken us maybe eight to ten years of development time. Visibility into that kind of capital wasn't, I mean we didn't have clarity on that. We didn't want to build
00:16:10
Speaker
a scooter company, which is one of the hundred scooter companies that you see today where the differentiator is only the lower cost that you're offering to a customer. But our strengths lie in creativity, design, tech and innovation and that all of that now aligns to the mid segment or the performance motorcycle category.
00:16:30
Speaker
Yeah. And just to add to what Maren is saying, see, I think we also realized that this was going to be a hard, long journey, right? This was not something that we are going to sort of get a quick buck or, you know, because it is required fundamental innovation. Half of the things that were needed on the motorcycles did not exist, right? Whether you call them the battery packs, the drive train, the power train, the vehicle electronics.
00:16:57
Speaker
None of the existing solutions would do the job. You can't take something that is built for a car and fit it onto a motorcycle. Even though it may be sophisticated and technologically advanced. You can't take something that is built for a low power scooter segment and put it onto a motorcycle because it will not do the job.
00:17:16
Speaker
in the middle of two extremes and there was no tech readily available to us which meant that everything had to be built ground up which meant that it was going to take time and it was really a question of
00:17:29
Speaker
how many people are going to stick through this to build it out because over time that becomes a sort of mode, it becomes a sort of differentiator and it's actually what has happened today. We are quite ahead of the industry and it's going to give us a few years of a head start from where the competition is at. Are there other players who are also in, you would be like a performance motorcycle segment?
00:17:56
Speaker
Yeah. Are there other players of the segment? EV, performance, motorcycles. So there are companies which are in different parts of the world, I would say, maybe Europe and the US, but essentially what they have also- In India, there's nobody.
00:18:13
Speaker
not in the kind of power bank that we are talking about, right? So if you look at motorcycles, which have north of 20 kilowatts of peak power, you know, more than 140 kilometers per hour top speed or anything north of 200 kilometers of range, you won't find anything in India other than the ultra-valid F7T shell, right? Okay. Which is kind of, you know, there are companies which make motorcycles, electric motorcycles, but you know, it's more of a shell over a low powered drive team.
00:18:41
Speaker
Okay. And when you say the engine power is 20 KWH, what does that mean? How does it compare to, like, I know a bullet is like 350 cc engine. Is there a way to understand what that means, 20 KWH? Yeah. Our platforms are 30, 30 kilowatt and above. I think what Neeraj mentioned is beyond 20, there is nothing, but we are already at 30. That translates to about 40 horsepower. And if you look at the industry that
00:19:11
Speaker
Typically, you have vehicles between 300 to 500 cc, outputting that kind of power.
00:19:17
Speaker
Okay, so it matches with the power band of typical IC motorcycles, right? It essentially boils down to the same physics, which is how much power are you putting out and that is you can represent that in kilowatts or in BHP. And the idea is if you're building a mid segment motorcycle, which is intended to compete or out compete 300 to 500, 600 CC bikes, you have to operate in that same power bank.
00:19:41
Speaker
Right. So that perspective, I think there aren't too many options globally as well. And the few other options that exist in other parts of the world are priced significantly higher than IC motorcycles. Right. So for example, the IC motorcycles in all of these segments, for the purpose of this discussion, if we talk in US dollars, a price between anywhere, you know, $6,000, $7,000 to, you know, 10, $11,000. Right.
00:20:08
Speaker
The EV options were at $20,000 or $30,000. So it was not really that the EV companies globally were able to sort of directly compete with the mainstream ICE motorcycles. And that's where we had to build the tech ground up to be able to even match that price point and make a meaningful impact in this segment. What is the pricing of the F77?
00:20:32
Speaker
So in India, yeah. Well, about an average between four and $5,000 north of three and a half to about four and a half lakh rupees. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Three and a half to four and a half lakh. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So which means, yeah, we can directly compete with the ICNMs even in terms of upfront price. And that was a big, big factor in, you know, making EVs mainstream and taking on the ICN. Okay. And, uh,
00:21:02
Speaker
You know, how long did it take you to make the F77 come true, to make that dream come true? I'm sure it must have been a journey which needed multiple things to go right from funding to technology to even the vendor ecosystem. So just tell me about that journey of making the F77 dream come true. Was it?
00:21:23
Speaker
Was this clear to you in terms of that something like the F77 is what you want to build? That we were clear on, not the shape and form because that was still up to ideation.
00:21:35
Speaker
But we were clear, we wanted to create an identity for what electric is, right? It needs to be very honest towards attributes and
Investment and Growth Amidst Challenges
00:21:45
Speaker
performance. So there is no quite looking at existing IC engines and deriving something from it, which is why we took a round-up new approach. And like Neeraj mentioned,
00:21:55
Speaker
Every single thing on the vehicle has to be designed from scratch. You are talking about battery pack today that is north of 60 kgs and you are talking about offsetting masses on IC engine vehicle which are an engine and a fuel tank engine about 50-20 kgs fuel tank about 10 kgs and you have multiple other parts but the architecture is very different the components are very different which means the entire chassis and the frame have to be reimagined from scratch.
00:22:22
Speaker
And in fact, this is where I think we'll start touching upon the influences of the world of aviation. So the person who heads engineering at ultraviolet from the mechanical side and the transit side, in fact, came from aviation aerospace background. He was dealing with designing landing gears for various aircrafts around the world. And more stuff has happened on the aviation plant with regard to our factory architecture, which we'll get into in more detail, but these were
00:22:52
Speaker
solutions that we found along the way because equivalent talent was not available from the pure automotive industry. And we had to answer your first question. We had factored about five years. We targeted 2020. I think COVID sort of threw everybody's plans off by a third bit. And I think we went through that. I think we had a phase of 18, 20 months period during COVID where
00:23:20
Speaker
focus innovation happened on the battery front and we doubled the range from where it was before that in 2019 to what we ultimately launched in 2022. We were at 150 kilometers in 2019 and what we put out in the market in 2022 was 300 kilometers and that was I think
00:23:38
Speaker
huge milestone in terms of technical development from a vector design perspective. Yeah. So we thought Psych 5 rounded to 7 and I think we were fairly on track with our schedule, but yeah, innumerable challenges along the way from various forums. Tell me that journey. I'm sure you would have made a version one and figured out what were the problems in it and just take me through that journey. That's seven years. Yeah. So the F7.
00:24:08
Speaker
Sure. So the F77, the first seven actually stands for the seventh generation of the motorcycle, right? So from 2016 to 2020, we had gone through seven versions, which were not incremental changes, but you know, significant improvements on the motorcycle. The first version was
00:24:29
Speaker
solely on the battery technology. So the first version that we built out had very smart batteries. This was the early days of actually proving that can we build out a battery pack that meets the performance and safety requirements of a motorcycle in this segment. So it wasn't so much about optimizing for, let's say, the power or the handling of the vehicle or the dynamics of the vehicle.
00:24:56
Speaker
purely about the battery pack and making sure that the BMS and the cells were all operating in place. That was the first version in 2016. This would be like a hand-assembled kind of a thing. Absolutely. Yes. The team was about four or five people.
00:25:14
Speaker
And this was prior to any investments, if I remember correctly. This was where we were googled back at that stage. And with that vehicle is where, you know, we put that together, made it functional. And that's when we started talking to investors and they started to see and realize that there's something here that, you know,
00:25:36
Speaker
That seems quite fascinating. And by the time we were talking to all of these investors and capital advisors, we had already started working on the second generation offering, which now we were heading on to solve the performance related aspects.
00:25:54
Speaker
The kinds of promises we are making was that in three months, we're going to build out a motorcycle that can out-compete any of the 300 to 500 cc bikes in terms of straight line speed, in terms of straight line acceleration. And initially, the people we told these things to were like, good luck with that. That sounds like something that would take probably a much longer time and probably going to involve a few hundred or thousand engineers.
00:26:22
Speaker
You guys, you know, a few people sitting in what seemed like a garage will not be able to pull off this kind of thing.
00:26:29
Speaker
And we were like, sure, okay, we'll take on this challenge. And three and six months later, we would actually deliver on that, right? So the second model, second generation of the motorcycle was actually outcompeting all the IC engine bikes in that site, right? And this was actually quite a far-pitched thing to actually accomplish. And for a second generation or second version of a prototype to actually do that,
00:26:53
Speaker
was pretty outrageous. But if you think back to our backgrounds, I think that was what we were good at, which is building something fundamentally new from scratch and doing that in a sort of very accelerated timeline. So basically what ended up happening is through each version like this, we would
00:27:12
Speaker
take on and solve problems which people thought would take a much longer time. We didn't take it all on at once also. For example, from the second generation to the third generation, the pageants had to get smaller, more modular. It wasn't weight and volume optimized.
00:27:29
Speaker
Right. So we went down from what used to be modular 14, 15 kilo battery packs to nine kilo battery packs. And there were three of them at that point, right? We went, reduced the sort of bill of materials on the vehicle, made it more streamlined, more efficient, made it more dynamic. Now we started getting into the dynamics of the vehicle. What do we reduce the bill of materials?
00:27:53
Speaker
So I think in the early days, the bill of materials is everything that goes onto the motorcycle, all of the hardware, right? Down to every single nut, bolt, frame, chassis, suspension, the electronic company. How many parts it has basically. Got it. Yeah. And it's in excess of a thousand. I think the focus here came from the fact that we were very clear on being on all the unit economics making sense.
00:28:20
Speaker
Right? We knew the industry is still recent, but like I mentioned earlier, we were building for the long term and this meant that the business has to make sense from the first product you sell. So which is why, you know, just talking about below materials as early as the second prototype, right?
00:28:35
Speaker
Along with bill of materials, we had some of our wrong suppliers in the book, the vendor and the supplier ecosystem to figure out whether things that are doable at a prototype stage are actually scalable into mass production. Because if you solve it, if you spend significant time engineering for a prototype and you're not able to translate that into a
00:28:54
Speaker
into something that can be mass produced, it is redoing that effort all over again, right? So, unit economics making sense, time being optimized from a development standpoint were two very important factors for the two of us and I think now that has translated to the code team at UV as well.
00:29:15
Speaker
And along with this, I think the space that we were just talking about, this transition between first and second prototype and figuring out the batteries, is where we were also running out of funds. It is capital that we had saved during our time working in the industry world. We had over, I think it's an important juncture because that's where our first investment happened. And that's a key milestone in this whole journey.
00:29:43
Speaker
So we had nearly over 100, 200 meetings and interviews with various, yeah, advisors and VCs and all of that, and very skeptical feedback from everybody we met. But there was this individual called Vishesh Rajaram, who was in Chennai, and he was getting into angel investment at that point, you know, setting up his fund.
00:30:11
Speaker
And I think he matters, he thought the tech that we built and for him, the fact that we are both passionate and we share a good amount of expertise and problem solving abilities in our core, in what the business is at the core, right? This was important for him and I think he
00:30:36
Speaker
He took a bet, put in the first angel investment, looked in a very prominent actor, Dhulkar Salman, from the Indian movie industry. And I think they both came together for the first investment. And I think that sort of really helped accelerate innovation from beyond where our personal means would allow us to get. Okay. So that was your angel round with Dhulkar and Rishish.
00:31:05
Speaker
Yes, yes. And so that's when we started making significant progress building out the team went to the second prototype. Along this time is where, you know, TVS Motors also started taking a look at what we were doing. And the investment of from TVS also, if I remember, happened in 2017, right? It took a period of time for from their perspective to evaluate the company.
00:31:28
Speaker
and sort of come on board. Post that is where the suppliers and the ecosystem also opened up to us. Because even from our supplier ecosystem perspective, they have hundreds of PV companies to look at. And for them, it's hard to tell which are the ones where there is a serious effort being put and which are the ones which are there tomorrow, may not be there a few months from now.
00:31:54
Speaker
Right. So that was the kind of thing that was going on. And this is where the supplier ecosystem interactions for our vehicle parts subsystem started to happen and the iterations to sort of get it into a final manufactured form. And that's where iteration, you know, the generation of three, four, five, six, seven started to happen. Right. And as we got closer and closer to the mass production versions of the vehicle,
00:32:18
Speaker
The effort on testing validation became very heavy because it became about running hundreds and thousands of kilometers every day, having test riders running each of the subsystems through a component-level test, whether it's the handlebar or the chassis in itself.
00:32:36
Speaker
Will it be able to withstand 100,000 kilometers or 500,000 kilometers. Right. So these aspects of the engineering durability, accelerated life testing, that's what started to come into, you know, the next generations of the wakers while obviously the plastics, the
00:32:53
Speaker
the aesthetics, the design elements, the ergonomics, all of these things started to get finalized, formalized, and things started to progress on that front. And through this entire period, we were always talking to different parties who could support us. And I remember the number because we actually tracked this number. We did over 900 meetings with investors and things like that. And the reason, I think, for the skepticism from me
00:33:22
Speaker
you know, different parties here is because they haven't seen this kind of success happen, you know, in the industry in India, right? They've seen software companies succeed. They've seen, you know, software as a service, but hardware companies, and even when you talk about hardware, you're talking about very specialized tech.
00:33:39
Speaker
They haven't seen so many successes in India. So which was one of the reasons I think which it took us a while to realize that maybe we also have to realize this and we just have to get through this. We find the right people to back us and we'll be on our way and it's going to be hard for us. It's hard for anyone else in this space as well. And over time, I think by the time
00:34:06
Speaker
This is quite counterintuitive, right? You look at all the leading tech companies globally, it's folks from India that are sort of pushing the boundaries and driving development. So for us, all of this seems so natural and quite frustrating that the rest of the world that we are talking to in terms of supporting us or being part of our journey is unable to wrap their minds around.
00:34:29
Speaker
Yeah, but the good part is I think we got around to 2019 where we did a formal launch event. This was in November 2019. How much had you raised by 2019 in terms of fundraise?
00:34:44
Speaker
Okay. Let me try to remember. I think they had raised by then probably $20 million. They stayed for 20, somewhere in that ballpark. This is from TVS and Angel Networks. Yes. By then, we also had support from Mr. Kumar and Sridhar Bembu, the Zoho group. So they were strong proponents of making an India, building up core engineering, core technology.
00:35:10
Speaker
And they really appreciated what we were trying to do. Kumar and Sridhar Vembo are today. Yes, both of them are founders of Zoho. Zoho is a pretty large company, right? And Kumar came in first alongside PBS from GoFrogal Technologies and Mr. Sridhar also invested in Heartavari. Zoho.
00:35:37
Speaker
Yeah, and I think for them, it was also about, you know, core engineering work and core intellectual property being built out in India, right? It's not just, okay, we assemble parts together and build something, you know, with where the core IP belongs elsewhere. There's nothing very innovative on the design or nothing innovative on the tech. It wasn't like that, right? And that's what excite them about. So through this and all.
00:36:04
Speaker
All of the early folks were in it for the long run, which was quite heartening for us because in that journey through 2019, the first three, three and a half years, because there were periods of uncertainty, there were periods of how we have certain support now who's going to see this through the next phase. We are pushing everything from our side in terms of building the tech and printing expertise on the design side and building out
00:36:30
Speaker
What today is a very strong brand as well. While we're doing this, I think there were multiple options for us too, or opportunities from other people to partner with us if we were to digress from our plans or deviate or narrowed on focus or focus elsewhere. So all sorts of advice came in, but the core group of investors that we had on board were
00:36:54
Speaker
very clear of the fact that we are in this to help you guys disrupt and build something amazing. So don't worry too much about the future. Let's focus on what we set out to do and they were pretty confident that if we get most of it right, we should have a way forward. I think this sort of backing was very encouraging even at times where we were worried about what's going to happen two months down the line.
00:37:25
Speaker
Yeah. And we would like what Narayan is talking about here is also, you know, um, different types of investors will see certain other segments and say that, why don't you make pattern packs? You know, why don't you just import parts from other parts of the world? Let's get started. Just sell something. Doesn't matter if it's good or not. Uh, you know, let's figure out the business part and then you guys can do all this design innovation. Why do you want to do all of this right now? Why don't you build a three-wheeler? Why don't you build, uh, you know,
00:37:55
Speaker
a low-powered scooter. That's where the market side. That's where the opportunity is. India is, you know, is an economy where the price points are very low. Why don't you stick to that, right? And all these, there are fair reasons to pursue those paths, but it wasn't something that, I mean, our core skills were not in. Yeah. There are other folks doing it, right? And that is the only focus. And I don't think
00:38:24
Speaker
that reflect more on what India is capable of also. We need more such end of us. I think today, perhaps we should catch up with Vishayesh. He's invested in a lot of deep tech companies. Ultraviolet was one of the first companies he invested in. But beyond that, he's sort of backing space tech, satellite companies, AR, VR companies, hardcore robotics, and vision-based systems. So I think
00:38:52
Speaker
This culture is starting to build and I think we hope it's only going to sustain or scale higher and higher. By 2019, you said in 2019 you did a commercial launch.
00:39:09
Speaker
Yes, we did an anvil. Yeah. Okay. So this was like two months before COVID. Typically you have this auto expo kind of a thing where they show models, which they're going to launch soon. So it was something similar to that.
00:39:26
Speaker
It was a little more serious. It was a fully functional vehicle, but it was from the pre-production set of vehicles at that point. The next phase for us was to kickstart production.
Team Expansion and Collaborative Design
00:39:39
Speaker
And I think that is exactly when COVID took the whole world by storm. A couple of questions before we go ahead. In that 2019 stage when you reached there, how big was the company? What was your headcount like?
00:39:54
Speaker
47. Okay. Yeah. What was the design team? Design team would be about 10 people. And I think about 30, 30 engineers across electronics, mechanical software, and maybe a few people on HR and other functions.
00:40:20
Speaker
Yeah, sourcing was an important function that we always had because the parts were coming from different suppliers and all of that. So we had a strategic sourcing team of a few people. And that was the stage, but yeah, very heavy on engineering is what I would say. How did you build this team? How did you figure out
00:40:40
Speaker
that whether to go and hire people from legacy automotive companies or to hire people who are like, let's say someone from an NID or like, you know, just talk to me about building this team. So one thing that helped was that, I mean, Neeraj, I'm just talking about our background and the fact that we had worked in the industry, right? We weren't freshers.
00:41:06
Speaker
And the fact that both of us had experience working and studying both in India and overseas gave us a very good knack of identifying what sort of folks we need and how to sort of cut through the noise and figure out who's capable of executing things, right? So this led us to a very unique phase of identifying, I would say, the first 20, 25 people in the company. And we would have sort of
00:41:36
Speaker
spent 20-30 hours with various people and got into a point where we know for a fact that this is the sort of chemistry that we're looking for in the team. It went all the way from folks that we knew in our professional circles to
00:41:54
Speaker
extensive LinkedIn hunts to just spend time going through various blogs and projects that people have done beyond their everyday work and I think this sort of passion driven people that we were looking for but very very strong with their core expertise and today we are still very much with the company and needing much bigger teams.
00:42:17
Speaker
So I think what was interesting through this phase was that some not so intuitive things that we learned, right? As a large company, what ends up happening, you create a job description, you create this entire hierarchy and structure and put all these boxes. And for each box, you attach a position, a title, and some job responsibilities. And then you put out that as an opening and hope people come in and apply for that, right?
00:42:45
Speaker
That was not the way that I actually panned out. In fact, it was the other way around, right? We would go looking for individuals and we would see where are the passionate people. We would go through their projects, whether it's on GitHub or on their blogs, on their side projects.
00:43:03
Speaker
And we would see who are these individuals, reach out to them, call them over on weekends. Most of them were actually already working in the industry. They were fairly senior in their careers. They've worked for 10-15 years. They already have a stable job and we couldn't even directly tell some of these people that
00:43:22
Speaker
come over and, you know, be part of ultraviolet. We couldn't do that because we were too small at that stage. What we would actually do is we were genuinely seeking out advice on how to build teams. And we were learning through the process and they would come over on weekends, spend time with us. And over a period of three, four weeks, that's where Narayan mentioned that you'd end up spending 20, 30 hours with some of these individuals. We would realize that, and they would also realize that this is more exciting than their day job.
00:43:50
Speaker
And they would say, you know, what would it take for me to be part of our driver? What do you guys think? And what then ended up happening was that the company started being built around these core pillars, right? And the jobs that were created were created around them, right? They had some goal skills. They were looking for additional support and we would hire more individuals. So it was big ground up that way based on the strengths of individuals in all these companies.
00:44:18
Speaker
And the last office that Neeraj was talking about, right, one of the early ones, the garage sipper, we had about seven tables there. Each table had one individual and that was a department. So, design, software, public electronics, prototyping. What else Neeraj? The finance table was also my table.
00:44:48
Speaker
Yeah, so it's pretty interesting that way to build out the thing, not something that any techs never teach us or any course would ever guide us. Help me understand what each of these departments does in terms of contributing to the end product.
00:45:06
Speaker
Design means like designing the chases and like how aerodynamic it is. In our case, when we're creating something from scratch, every team had to work together. Today, if you look at the industry, if you look at the company launching a new product, they would already have a chassis and they probably do a facelift on the body or things like that.
00:45:28
Speaker
It's seldom that you take an all-new approach altogether. Most vehicles that get launched today have a fair share of shared components from a previous platform that the company has, right? So for us, it was a blank slate, which means battery teams, the power electronics teams, the folks working on the chassis, the design teams, the UX teams all have to coordinate on a day-to-day basis to figure out that everyone's, you know,
00:45:56
Speaker
cohesively adding to solving the same problem. And I think a fair part of our time, Neeraj and me was also making sure that this alignment was clear across all the teams, right? And yeah, I think these work well. At a more fundamental level.
00:46:11
Speaker
You said there was a battery team. There was a power electronics team as an outsider. I'm not there. What is the difference? Okay. Okay. Okay. So let's take it one at a time, right? So just sort of starting with design, right? Design entails everything from market research, user studies.
00:46:28
Speaker
the UX, the user interactions, the ergonomics, the emotional appeal of a vehicle, the exteriors, the surfaces, how these surfaces interact with each other, how the form comes together on the motorcycle, and what kind of appeal it has to the end consumer. This is just from that perspective, everything where
00:46:51
Speaker
the customer or the rider actually interacts with the vehicle. So from here, there's also a lot of interaction with the mechanical engineering, which is detailed out internal structures of the vehicle. You have what is called the A surfaces, which are the outside surfaces of the motorcycle. You have the B surfaces, which are on the inside. And then you start to have elements which interact with the chassis or the frame of the vehicle.
00:47:18
Speaker
Right. And that's where, you know, a lot of core engineering, mechanical engineering simulation, what they call a CFD, computational fluid dynamics, CA, you know, the design elements of engineering all come together and validate whether these are structurally sound. Right. So we're still talking right now about design and engineering, detailed engineering and analysis simulation.
00:47:39
Speaker
When it comes to the electronic side and the software side, we have embedded system software, which is most of the vehicle related software that's running on the microprocessors and the microcontrollers. So that's one thing. Then we have the digital electronics. So digital electronics.
00:47:56
Speaker
refers to all of the logical circuits that are helping making these core decisions when you turn your throttle, how much torque needs to be delivered. So those circuits, right, which are evaluating the more signals aspect of it. So that's the digital electronics part. The analog in the power electronics is more to go with, you know, higher currents where switching is involved.
00:48:20
Speaker
where core functionality of powering around the lights or, you know, the subsystems, and it sort of heads into power electronics, which is core elements of the, you know, drive rate, for example, right? How do you charge a vehicle? How do you deliver? How do you convert electrical energy into mechanical energy? That's where the power electronics comes in or the other way around, right? How do you convert electrical energy from your grid?
00:48:44
Speaker
into chemical energy and your battery back so the chargers come into the picture. So that's where power electronics comes in. Then comes aspects of, for example, the battery engineering because batteries are a very separate and a very different kind of
00:49:03
Speaker
How do I put it? Because it's a combination of mechanical engineering, the way the cells come together, the interconnects. It's a power electronics problem because there is a BMS. There's digital electronics, which has done the safety aspects, there's software on the BMS, which also relates to safety. BMS is battery management software.
00:49:21
Speaker
Yes, battery management system software is a part of that. Yeah. Right. So the battery team is one independent team, right? Which has all of the elements and then there are, you know, vehicle electronics. So that's how it sort of flows and it all has to come together as a way in the form of a vehicle. Right. And that's where.
00:49:39
Speaker
you know, our role would sort of come in to make, you know, all of this come together in a manner, which is that it's operating as a seamless one single unit, one single vehicle, and not as separate systems. You know, yeah, it had to operate in a seamless way. How does electric
00:50:00
Speaker
current get converted into motion. I mean in an ice engine, there is that piston which moves because of explosion of the fuel. How does it happen in an EV? Okay, so if you see go down to the core of it, it finally boils down to the motor. It boils down to the play between electricity and magnetism. Any sort of, whether you take an induction motor or whether you take, you know,
00:50:29
Speaker
permanent magnet based motor you have alternating currents which either induce a current in the rotor right which then opposes the current and sort of then induces motion or you have an alternating current which opposes a magnetic field where magnets and work and then the magnet is forced to move in the rotor the rotor is the only part which has the freedom to move
00:50:52
Speaker
So it finally translates to that. And this technology, I think, has been around from the early 1900s. It has obviously been refined from our hydroelectric plants to more portable motors to everywhere in terms of turbines. And that has now reached a stage where we are able to put this kind of power density onto a motorcycle that we can control with our hands.
00:51:21
Speaker
The motor which runs a fan is also the motor which runs in an EV.
00:51:29
Speaker
So the principles are the same, right? So the principles end up being the same. For example, a ceiling fan, you're talking about less than 200 watts of power being output, right? So from 200 watts to 20 or 30 kilowatts, you're talking about a 100 or 150x increase in power, but the weight is not going up that much. A ceiling fan is still what I'd say in the order of
00:51:55
Speaker
8 to 10 kilos I would expect, or maybe 6 to 8 kilos, the motor on our motorcyclist 15 kilos. So the weight went up to X, but the output went up 150 times. So yeah, that's where I think the level of sophistication and engineering needed to make that happen is quite significant. And do you use like a BLDC technology for the motor?
00:52:19
Speaker
Yes, so the BLDC PMSM, so these are different terms, so permanent magnet, synchronous motor, permanent magnet, AC motor, BLDC is the brushless DC motor, but the common aspect is the magnets using neodymium or what they call rare earth magnets.
00:52:39
Speaker
And the idea behind BLDC, PMSM, PMAC, all it comes down to power density and being able to put out that kind of power in a small volume and form factor. Okay. Got it. Okay. Narayan, you were saying something, sorry. Well, I was talking about the previous point where neither was talking about the team structure, right? What goes into design of the vehicle, now it is woven into a sub-component, like a battery, for instance.
00:53:07
Speaker
All the same teams have to get involved to design the battery as well. You have mechanical teams designing the structure and the thermal aspects of the battery. You have hardcore physics and chemistry understanding things at a cell level and how safety is enabled. You have electronics, embedded systems, software, the whole BMS comes into play. You have aerodynamics and thermal simulation teams figuring out how to extract heat and dissipate it to the outside world. You have then the design team figuring out how the battery pack on the outside is.
00:53:37
Speaker
designed to maximize surface area for heat dissipation. Then you have the vehicle design team that figures out how air is channeled into the right places to remove heat. So every sub-component also requires, because like we said, the whole industry of this nascent commodity parts are not available for the segments that we are designing for.
00:54:01
Speaker
All of these streams need to get involved for pretty much everything that we've innovated on. Does the design happen? Like first you create a digital version, like a digital to it, and then you make it into a real life version. Is that how it happens? Because it's a simulation. I think the first two years we worked both in Pabil.
00:54:25
Speaker
simulation, but I think solving things from a battery and like Neeraj mentioned, getting batteries capable of outputting power to produce 300 cc plus performance, right? That required real world testing. So I think while we were doing a lot of simulation, we prioritized real world outputs in the initial phase. And I think after the first two years, both sort of came in quite seamlessly.
00:54:52
Speaker
And I think from a design perspective, I think also what is interesting is from the design team's perspective, what was very fascinating and interesting for me to see as a sort of engineer who I haven't seen that before is the way the design team actually was working. Right. So there was lots of.
00:55:09
Speaker
usage of VR, where actual motorcycles are being rendered in 3D. And if we were doing that for the first time, because we were accelerating the progress, because normally what ends up happening is you build a physical structure or a prototype, it's made out of clay or some kind of hard structure, and then only you have a sense of what it is in three dimensions.
00:55:33
Speaker
Right. Four month process. Our intention was before we invest time and the capital into building those out, how do we get a real world sense? And that's where VR came into play. So a lot of VR was being done and a lot of hands sculpting happened at a later stage. And then it went back into 3D and into the virtual world. And from there, the simulations continue.
00:55:56
Speaker
Interesting. Do you think this Apple has launched this VR headset? Is there a use case for it in companies like yours that you're designing? 100%. We've been using various devices, the Oculus and a couple of options before that as well. I think we've been using VR for about six years now.
00:56:17
Speaker
Yeah, from the earliest days in terms of whatever headsets were available, we were always using them to get different perspectives into, you know, how do you create these artificial worlds. Wow. Fascinating.
00:56:30
Speaker
Okay, cool. So let's come back to 2019. You unveiled the vehicle and you wanted to manufacture it. How did you want to manufacture it? Did you want to invest in setting up a plant or did you have some sort of vendors who would manufacture it for you or how would it get done?
00:56:48
Speaker
So we were at that point, we had evaluated all these different options and we had sort of narrowed down that we would do the manufacturing, but at a scale that would make sense for us. We knew that we would have to start our own pilot production plant and in January of 2020, that was what we were looking for.
00:57:09
Speaker
That was essentially we're going ahead with the tooling, the dyes, the fixtures with all our suppliers and we were actually identifying a place where we would produce the motorcycles for the first
Adapting During the Pandemic
00:57:20
Speaker
time. So this was happening all the way from September 2019 to
00:57:24
Speaker
January 2020 and late in January 2020. What capacity plan did you want to set up? So at that time also we were looking at a plant capacity of about 10,000 to about 30,000 vehicles annually and that was the capacity that we were looking for.
00:57:40
Speaker
Now, interestingly enough, in late January, we were traveling around different parts of the world. I remember we went to Dubai for some event and we started to hear news about what would end up becoming the planet. There's something going on there that in February, we knew it's going to turn out to be a little crazy and we sort of started planning in February.
00:58:09
Speaker
almost 45 days before the first lockdown that production may not make sense at this point of time, even though we had announced it publicly. So we started planning out how would we operate if it goes into this kind of lockdown.
00:58:26
Speaker
And that was a little hard to do, right? All of our engineers are working with hardware. You need equipment. You need tons of other people's support, whether it is technicians or other engineers. They all need to be co-located. Work from home isn't a real possibility. So we were grappling with this for the first time. And before the lockdown actually hit, we planned out how the company would sort of be spread across the city.
00:58:55
Speaker
and it would turn into different labs. I think however I had real estate available in the rooms and garages that were empty, we sort of set up labs and I think people would work in clusters. I think the other problem was we didn't know how long this is going to last, right? Is it a month? Are we looking at a quarter? And over time it got a lot more scary, right? You don't know if it's going to last a year and
00:59:17
Speaker
Then when is the whole industry going to get back to that well-oiled state that it was before the pandemic? So not only are we accounting for the pandemic itself to subside, but there is a significant period after that where everything takes time to fall back into places.
00:59:36
Speaker
So we ended up sort of realizing that this is not when production is going to happen. So we asked ourselves what would we want to do in this period of time when production is not possible. And the quick realization that happened was how about we work on the next generation of the vehicle which we always wanted to sort of put out.
00:59:56
Speaker
Right. So what are the limitations that time with generation, like the fifth, you know, this was actually the seventh one that we had put out. So technically we have the eight generation, but we still call it the 77. But we sort of had put out these range numbers of 150 kilometers. It was roughly a four and a half kilowatt battery pack. Right. And we realized that.
01:00:19
Speaker
The requirement to build that vehicle was from a psychological requirement of crossing 100 kilometers on a motorcycle. So we had reached 130, 150 kilometers. But then we looked at all the feedback. There's an insatiable thirst for range. Can you give me more range? Can you give me 200 kilometers? So we said, let's go back to the drawing board.
01:00:41
Speaker
How much can we get out of the vehicle? 200 is an obvious target. Let's get 200 kilometers of range on the bike and let's see what we can go beyond that as well. And that's where we started to rework the batteries and the core engineering. And over time, through 2021, 2022, we ended up with a motorcycle that does 307 kilometers, which, you know, out surpassed even the requirement of just 200.
01:01:09
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And the crazy part was the price in doubled, right? Yeah. I think that was the hard part for us to manage. Of course, solving for the tech took a lot of time, but I mean, making sure the price points are still in the zone of where these motorcycles lie was also very important. How much money in the bank did you have in COVID hit?
01:01:34
Speaker
I don't remember exactly what it was. How many months could you have? We were planning to go into production and since we didn't know that, I think we were able to manage the finances. Thank a few people who helped us also along the way. Of course, our investors have only been supported. Our owners, the building owners were already operating.
01:02:01
Speaker
They spoke to us and told us, hey, guys, I know the whole world is going through a tough time. We're going to reduce rent for you for the foreseeable future. So similar to this, I mean, a huge shout out to them, very, very cool people. They love what we're doing.
01:02:17
Speaker
in the same facility for about 6-7 years now.
Global Interest and Market Strategy
01:02:21
Speaker
The first 4 years was R&D and now the last 1-1 years it's been the retail experience center. So similar to this, there are a lot of people who extended support in multiple ways, all of that added to making this sustainable.
01:02:38
Speaker
Also, I think what helped was we hadn't sort of taken that decision to take a production facility and go on out on that because we sort of took that call in January. At that time, it felt like it wasn't a very
01:02:57
Speaker
There wasn't sufficient information to say that this is actually going to turn into a pandemic, but we still took that call. Right. And that was an important thing because otherwise we would have spent several millions of dollars on a production facility and whatnot. And the recovering from that would have been much, much harder.
01:03:15
Speaker
Yeah, we were going through contracts at that point, various contracts of real estate options and facilities and working with auditors to figure out what makes sense, et cetera, but we sort of could have blanket trees on all of that till we had more information.
01:03:31
Speaker
Okay. Got it. Interesting. And I guess you raised your next round in 21, like $17 million. The time went, the XOR group, the Lingoto group and the Kwonkom and Charles came in. Neeraj, was it?
01:03:49
Speaker
22? Yes, it was in 22. And that was a $24 million round. And this was actually prior to the launch of the vehicle that is in the market today. Okay, so by this time, I think everything had been sort of settled on things like our production facility was up, the certifications were done, we had a sense that this vehicle is actually going to, you know, hit it out of the park in terms of
01:04:17
Speaker
consumer feedback, all of the signs were there. And it was, I think finally all of this closed two months before the launch event in 2022. Okay. Did you take pre-orders? Yes. Yes. So we started opening up pre-orders.
01:04:37
Speaker
on the day of the post. Not for the sake of investment though. The orders was an organic requirement from our side to sort of gauge market potential and all those things, but it wasn't linked to.
01:04:49
Speaker
Yeah. And what was happening was that it was turning into, it was snowballing into sort of some crazy demand. The limited edition vehicles all got booked out in, I think less than, I remember the first limited edition series that got booked out was in less than an hour. 77 vehicles. The second time that it happened, which was a space edition vehicle of the F77 got booked out under 90 seconds.
01:05:13
Speaker
Right. So that demand was so significant that our websites, you know, suffered in all downtown. The traffic was so high because people were exploring and it wasn't just, okay, people coming to all book it. They're all excited about the motorcycle. They're all checking it out in different aspects, watching the videos. Right. And I think what was very heartening for us was
01:05:39
Speaker
Leading up to the launch, there was awareness created and pre-ordered interests coming from 190 countries.
01:05:49
Speaker
Right. And that was crazy. And this was completely organic. We hadn't done any sort of performance marketing. I think the only thing we've done is showcase our R&D and our testing processes. That was our marketing until that point. And that had reached 190 countries and there was at least one person from each of these 190 countries that had
01:06:11
Speaker
put in a request for, you know, a motorcycle. But of course, certain markets, there were larger groups of people. We could see the word of mouth also happening. If somebody in Germany made a booking, we would get an email and we would see that over the next 10 days. That zone is now snowballing into a few more interests coming in, bookings coming, etc. Can you serve those markets? Wouldn't you need to get the
01:06:39
Speaker
like the Transportation Authority of Germany to certify the vehicle before you get exported there. Absolutely. So what we're talking about is organic potential consumer interest coming in. We hadn't collected money from people outside of India at that point.
01:06:56
Speaker
I think this also gave us a good view into our strategy as a company. So if you're, I mean, I'm sure you're aware, we showcased the F77 and launched the F91 at Aikma November, 2023. And what is a part of Aikma, sorry? Aikma, yes. I mean, I'd have to
01:07:20
Speaker
I don't think I'll be able to pronounce it right. It's one of the largest four-wheeler mobility exports in the world. So this is basically the Milan motorcycle show in Italian. There's an acronym abbreviation for EICMA. But the idea here is this is
01:07:39
Speaker
the one place in the world where everybody comes to showcase their motorcycles. That's where you see all of the cutting-edge technology. Last year in November, we showcased the F77 and the F99, especially to European markets at the Milan Motorcycle Show.
01:07:59
Speaker
All of the people who had been waiting for us throughout all of the European countries actually came down, checked out the motorcycles and right now is when we're going through, you know, we've completed certain aspects of the battery certification, you know, the company certification at an ISO level.
01:08:17
Speaker
to actually go ahead and deliver these motorcycles in Europe. So there's still certain aspects of the local certification going on, but the idea is now we're at that stage where very soon we will start to deliver these bikes. We'll start to consume. Yes. Okay. And what is the difference between the F77 and F99? So the F99 is...
01:08:44
Speaker
Yeah. So the F99 represents, so it's called the F99 racing platform, right? The factory racing platform. So just to give you some historical background, like most motorcycle companies, OEMs in the world.
01:09:00
Speaker
usually have a separate project where their racing endeavors are taken up. Like if you know Ferrari or Porsche, a lot of them have a separate division into racing. So the intent is the R&D there follows
01:09:16
Speaker
kind of an autonomous approach. That's the bleeding edge, basically. Yes. And you're not solving at the start. At the start, you're not solving for commercial objectives, but you're solving super complex or highly challenging technical problems. And once that solution is obtained, then it becomes interesting from a business standpoint to see how commercialize that. That plus the fact that I think one of our cornerstones is performance, right? So made a lot of sense to
01:09:47
Speaker
build the product and the brand in that direction towards the future, which is I think electric racing is going to be a very strong part of the transition.
01:09:58
Speaker
for mobility itself. And I think we have the forefront of that today with the F99 platform. Yeah. So this motorcycle is capable of going more than 270 kilometers per hour. And what is more important than the spec to me is the actual process that we followed, right? So this is exactly the same thing that we did five, six years ago when we started out with the F77, right? We're building something that didn't exist.
01:10:23
Speaker
We were pushing the boundaries of what is possible with the kind of tech. While there was a sort of, eventually it has to turn into a commercial, commercially available product. At that time, it was all about solving some really hard problems.
01:10:38
Speaker
And that's exactly what we got back into doing last year on the F99. And, you know, all of the parts that we had put aside when we were building up the F77 as a binding to production, right? There were certain things that seemed to outrage us. There were things that seemed that, you know, if we did this, you know, it'd be very hard to actually commercially produce this. It'll make the vehicle much, much faster. But, you know, I don't know if we'll be able to meet the price point.
01:11:02
Speaker
Things like carbon 504 instance, right? It's not scalable at a mass production level, but at smaller volumes, definitely something that we're looking at. Yeah. Active aerodynamics is the one of the only motorcycles in the world, which actually has active aerodynamics where different surfaces.
01:11:21
Speaker
There are parts in the motorcycle that react to the environment and the riding conditions around. For instance, what we were solving for here is your ability to have a more planted coronary, a faster entry and exit into commas. Well, as you name, a certain winglet, which is part of the bike opens out, will change the air pressure on one side of the motorcycle versus the other. So you get a more planted feel as your coronary. So we are talking about
01:11:50
Speaker
Very very minute.
01:11:52
Speaker
improvements in time around the racetrack on a lap-kyle lap basis. So that's where the sort of innovation comes into play. And again, this goes back to a little bit of the aviation approach because you're on fighter jets and these kinds of aircraft. You have different flight surfaces that help you maneuver very rapidly and very quickly in dogfights and these kinds of things. So those kind of flight surfaces are there on the motorcycle. And this was an aspiration that we had several years ago.
01:12:21
Speaker
and it's now part of the F99 and all of these things are coming through in terms of again pushing the boundaries in terms of what is possible. I mean building an electric vehicle that does 270 kilometers is insane. I mean the amount of R&D and safety that you need to put, testing that you need to put these machines through from a battery and a motor and of course the whole
01:12:45
Speaker
mechanical aspects, right? Because as speed increases beyond a certain point, all of these things work exponentially.
01:12:54
Speaker
what work to do 150 kilometers an hour. I mean, it's not just doubling that capability to hit 250, 300 kilometers an hour. It's a very different already approach altogether. And so for example, things have to get stronger, but also get much, much lighter. So think about that terms. So in fact, there are so many things that, you know, actually blow our minds even today, right? So for example,
01:13:18
Speaker
We now routinely rent out airports and airstrips to test the F77 motorcycle. So you have a two kilometer to four kilometer runway, which is a concrete environment. We can maintain safety and have our protocols in place.
01:13:34
Speaker
So obviously when we did it for the first time, that blew my mind, right? But today we have reached a stage where even that is insufficient to be able to test the F99, right? Because you need more, longer distances, you need more buffer, you need more safety protocols. So an airport is insufficient when in the early days of ultraviolet that felt like a mind-boggling thing to be renting out an airport. And what is the F99 going to be priced at?
01:14:01
Speaker
So we actually haven't announced any pricing. There is speculation in the market, lots of companies and media outlets have put their own numbers there. I think the intent was never to sort of put out a number. Our idea was to sort of highlight the innovation that is possible and we're also building out our racing team.
01:14:19
Speaker
And from that perspective, this is first going to be built out in a smaller number of units, but it is intended to solve some very, very difficult problems. You're not going to sell it anytime soon. Is that what you're saying? Well, I think it will head towards that. But what Neeraj mentioned is the first point is to get all of our jobs.
01:14:39
Speaker
performance objectives bang on and then we'll start translating that into what makes sense from a feasible commercial objective standpoint. Yes, we have announced that it will be available in the latter half of 2025, but we have not announced any price point at this point. But I'm guessing it will be at least double if not more of the F77.
01:15:01
Speaker
Yeah, I think very much that you wouldn't be wrong with that assumption. Yes. Yes. Yeah. The kind of tech that is there and that I think it is quite expensive to put it all together. Right. Narayan mentioned a lot of carbon fiber on pretty much every surface on that motorcycle. It feels more like an aircraft in a motorcycle. Different battery tech, different electronics, different lifetream systems.
01:15:29
Speaker
Yeah, and very different materials used for various parts of the chassis and the bodywork. How many units of F77 have you sold till date? How many ones have you been selling it for?
01:15:41
Speaker
I think we started deliveries in March or April of 23. So we've sold, I think we've built out about 800 or motorcycles and we've delivered a large part of that. And basically this is most predominantly in Bangalore.
01:16:04
Speaker
Yeah, in Bangalore. And now there are a few vehicles because there's such demanding customers from other parts of the country. We did deliver and set up service in Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Cochin and Mumbai. And that's where now the, you know, outlets and the distribution and our retail presence is coming up.
01:16:27
Speaker
So in the next six months you'll see us across about 15 different cities spanning south to north and east. How does one set up the sales channel for selling a bot cycle? Do you appoint dealers who set up showrooms or are you going to set up showrooms yourself? How will you scale up the sales of it?
01:16:54
Speaker
So the first experience center that we built out is called the UV hanger, the alternate hanger. That's where we're sitting out of right now as well. And this was a template for us to figure out the right experience for a customer, the design of the store formats, the allocation of the real estate towards showcasing the motorcycles and
01:17:19
Speaker
in a way where you get enough rope to touch and feel and you have a great ride experience. And how do you try? I mean, the location that we are at, we are also one of the wide main roads in Bangalore. So to get a feel of the performance aspects of the bikes, I mean, no urban condition will do justice, but you do get some sense of that here.
01:17:39
Speaker
So I think it was important to solve all of this. We've taken some time. We've not rushed into setting up multiple stores or onboarding too many dealers until we've gotten it right here. I think now we are confident, and that's why work has already started. And the cities that Neelaj mentioned are going to go live rather quickly. Cochin, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, and a couple of other places. And I think over six months, you will see 50 more cities coming in.
01:18:07
Speaker
Model is going to be Bangalore of this particular round. Facility is company-owned, company-operated. Scaling up will be more of a dealer-operated business. Of course, Ultraviolet is going to be involved from a sales training and a service training goal and a service assistant perspective.
01:18:26
Speaker
How does the model work for the dealers in EVs? Because in ICE, I believe a lot of their revenue comes from service, but in EVs there's not much service revenue because EVs don't need as much service as an ICE vehicle does.
01:18:42
Speaker
Yeah. So I think that's kind of that is actually quite true. Right. So the model when it comes to electric vehicles is still evolving, but what we have seen, especially in the context of ultraviolet, it may not apply to other EV companies, et cetera.
01:18:58
Speaker
There is a fair bit of accessories, merchandise, customization. People really, really love to customize their motorcycles. So what would earlier represent service revenue could actually come in from that customization and from the accessories business. And that's frankly what we have seen. But again, that depends on what kind of vehicle you're selling and how much do people want to personalize and customize the vehicles. But in our case, that's working quite well.
Indian Market Positioning and Economic Benefits
01:19:29
Speaker
And these accessories for customizing, these are produced by you or you have like partnerships with other vendors who supply this or each dealer procures it on his own. So we have multiple such models. Some of these accessories are actually made by us. Some are working with certain vendors or working, you know, co-branded kind of opportunities.
01:19:53
Speaker
Some of them are meant to go on the motorcycle, some are just merchandise or riding gear. So one of these things, different models exist, but the idea is whatever is on the motorcycle is very, very, very designed.
01:20:08
Speaker
fit into the vehicle seamlessly, it has to integrate without affecting the performance of the aerodynamics. So that's where we get very heavily involved. All of the accessories that go on the vehicles today are manufactured by Antoine. So it's OEM certified accessories that are going out.
01:20:29
Speaker
So there are folks that want storage for longer rides. Also, that is now going to be launched shortly. We have an entire, it's equivalent for both of your car, right, enabling YouTube. Unlock longer distances travel, you can carry your charger with you, you can carry clothes and other, almost talk with you on a longer ride. We've got tank grips, we've got accessories that are a little more aesthetic and functional like the wheel caps and lever guards that,
01:20:57
Speaker
that look very aerodynamic, but also protect your fingers in the case of collision or a minor accident. So multiple things like this, but I think we've started down this path. And I think we are also studying, analyzing, and I think the point is, from a dealer perspective, this is where the service revenue is going to be offset. And I think we are actively looking at getting into this in a deeper manner.
01:21:29
Speaker
Okay. Understood. How big is the market in India for like a three and a half, four like rupees bike.
01:21:37
Speaker
So, okay. So the way to actually, the way that we look at this segment, it's not just about the upfront price of the vehicle, right? What is interesting is to look at it from the point of view of how many motorcycles or vehicles in the tubular space are bought with the perspective of it's not your utility value, right? Anything that a person buys for more than two lakh rupees in a motorcycle is bought for reasons that go beyond
01:22:07
Speaker
It's a life cycle. You don't just commute. Yes, yes. Lifestyle, pride of ownership, adventure performance. There are different aspects of it. And all of these are markets that we actually tap into. So if you look at it from that lens, it is quite a large number. It's almost close to a million vehicles sold annually. In fact, the entire market for these kind of vehicles is globally about 3 million vehicles.
01:22:35
Speaker
So, India represents one-third of that market. Europe represents another 800,000 vehicles annually in this space. The U.S. is about 500,000. And, you know, you have LATAM and East Asia representing another huge part of this market.
01:22:52
Speaker
So that's the actual segment that we address at 77. Let me add one more point there. I think closing in on one year since the possibility of the vehicles, or I think that point was about a week back. We have a few people that have clocked about close to 20 or over 20,000 kilometers and they've saved about 75, 80,000 rupees in one year of operation alone. So now,
01:23:20
Speaker
When you announce that the product is going to go on sale and all of that, you may not realize this, but now there is tangible evidence of the benefits of a well-engineered, efficient electric vehicle. And I think if you think about it that way, compared to an IC option, can an F77 pay itself off in four to five years of operation? And the other question people have is,
01:23:49
Speaker
on the batteries. I think there is a concern nationwide or worldwide that, what about batteries? Do I need to reinvest in batteries? And from the way we've engineered, designed and tested the batteries out, I think we can fairly, very confidently guarantee an eight to 10 year usage period where you have no concern or through your ownership cycle of owning an alternate product, a battery replacement should not even be a concern to you.
01:24:15
Speaker
And I think we'll have more information coming out in the coming weeks on this front, more data being available as well. But I mean, that's the way we are looking at it. It's not just what the upfront cost is. It's our own ownership model that you need to consider as well.
01:24:33
Speaker
You are essentially competing with, say, Harley-Davidson in terms of the kind of market category? No, I think in India today, I bring manufacturer as well.
01:24:48
Speaker
Every single Japanese, Indian, European, every manufacturer's got a 300 plus CC variant available. So our competition is, I would say, across pretty much every brand you put name. That is into motorcycles, right?
01:25:04
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Understood. And who else is doing electric bikes in this category globally? You said India, there's nobody who's doing this. Is it like a Ducati or something like that? Everyone has their projects. I think everyone has announced their projects. And in fact, as far back as when we started the company to, I think five or six years before that,
01:25:27
Speaker
Every large OEM has announced projects for their electric motorcycles in some shape or form, whether it's racing or whether it's a concept motorcycle, or a show, or a kind of launch. So pretty much the Japanese manufacturers, the Austrian, the German ones, the American ones, everyone's showcased their vehicles, right? But what, again, is the sort of, I'd say the gap
01:25:57
Speaker
is the price point also in terms of accessibility, in terms of announcing a vehicle at $20,000 or $30,000.
01:26:06
Speaker
attempt to solve it, it's really, really hard to actually solve everything. You say that I'll solve for performance, then how are you going to solve the cost? You solve for design, how are you solving for performance? So getting these things right, that's, I think, been our journey, and that's where I think it's benefited us to sort of build out the motorcycle to meet that price point. Okay. By when do you think you'll be like selling 10,000 bikes a year?
01:26:34
Speaker
I think we will make a fair amount of progress this year itself, with most of our retail presence going live in a couple of months. International sales will also start this year in 2024, with pilots being run in certain European markets. And I think we are actually on track to be able to get to that 10K number in the latter part of this year.
01:27:00
Speaker
It is an ambitious task, but knowing the kind of feedback that we have, the kind of customer satisfaction, I wouldn't even call it satisfaction because they're so delighted with their vehicles. They love their motorbikes. It's turning into a community called the Sport Dreams.
01:27:19
Speaker
It's sort of creating a very harmonious brotherhood among people. So all of these things are working quite well. And that is because the product is doing a fantastic job. And that's exactly what we wanted it to achieve over five, six, seven years.
01:27:36
Speaker
Out of this 10,000, how many will be sold in India and how many outside? I think the fair majority would be India because this year, getting the international certifications, all of that, it will consume the next foreseeable quarter or so. Globally, 2024 is going to be our ending and I think ramping up will happen next year.
Production Localization and Software Integration
01:28:02
Speaker
I mean, in the long term, how much of your sales will be India? How much will be global? What do you estimate? So I actually think it's going to reflect the market today. Right. So today a million vehicles is, you know, the market in India and the overall market is 3 million vehicles. That's only a third of the overall market in India. Right. So I'd say over time, you know, more than a majority of our vehicles will be sold outside of India. Wow.
01:28:29
Speaker
You would service it from India only like manufacture here and then send. I mean, it's a pack of volumes, right? At a certain critical volume number is when we will start thinking about, you know, localizing some of the assembly and the operational aspects. To start with, we're not getting into that. To start with, we're working closely with distributors that are going to be shipping the vehicle straight from our factory.
01:28:59
Speaker
How much of your production is localized and how much is imported components? What is the level of localization? Except for cells and the magnets that go into the motors,
01:29:18
Speaker
a very small number of the electronics components. I think pretty much every other component is completely localized in indirection. So the way actually we look at it is what?
01:29:31
Speaker
Part of the value is captured in India, right? So there may be commodity parts or proprietary commodity parts, you know, that are on the vehicle but are very specialized in manufacturing like Narayana inside the cells, right, in different parts of Japan or Taiwan or, you know.
01:29:48
Speaker
Korea that are coming in and being part of the vehicle or even the microcontrollers microchips in India and it's going to take another half a decade for microcontrollers microchips to be manufactured here.
01:30:03
Speaker
As a consequence of this, what we are importing is mostly commodity parts and the value that is attributed to it is much smaller, you know, percentage, you know, it's less than, I would say probably 30% of the cost of the overall vehicle.
01:30:20
Speaker
In fact, I would think it's actually lower than that. We have to reject those estimates. And a lot of the value is captured in India because even the assembly of the PCBs, et cetera, it's all done locally there. And most of the value addition is in India, right? Only the commodities are coming from outside. Okay. Fascinating. What's the role of software in the bike?
01:30:42
Speaker
I mean, that is the core intelligence, the decision-making framework. So even in terms of software, there are different levels of software on the vehicle. Down to the most basic microcontroller, which is operating in a single safety element, and its only job is to keep monitoring and making decisions on safety-related aspects. Two higher-level functions which are things like... Give me an example of this.
01:31:11
Speaker
Safety element being monitored by a microcontroller. Yeah, for example, you know, short circuits within the battery management system, right? Any sort of short circuit that is a result of, you know, tampering or, you know, an accident.
01:31:26
Speaker
So, there are various different types of systems intended to cater to just that one type of failure mode. So, for this particular failure mode, there's an analog mechanism which is, you know, there are fuses which end up operating in, you know, a few milliseconds. There are digital circuits and microcontrollers which operate in microseconds and the software that is written to, you know,
01:31:51
Speaker
continuously monitor and operate on that. That software is also written by us. So that's an example of a microcontroller at a base level. Up to higher level functions, which are things like what is running on the cluster. You have your user interface, the graphic, the maps. We're talking about the kind of interactions with your
01:32:15
Speaker
Yeah. Is it like, I mean, in vehicles, you have this Android or Apple car. Is it something similar here? Yes.
01:32:25
Speaker
Okay. Yes, it does interact with your phone. It's running a similar Linux based operating system. It's great to operate very much like our phones, but with a more timing critical requirement, right? On your phone, for example, when you open an app, it may open in 200 milliseconds or a second, right? You have no control on that.
01:32:46
Speaker
When you're switching between apps on your phone, there is no guarantee on performance. But on a motorcycle, it is very critical that all responses or all interactions with the human side have to happen within a predictable timeframe. And that's where the software starts to become very different. There's predictability requirements, there's deterministic, it has to respond within x milliseconds for it to make a meaningful difference.
01:33:17
Speaker
So that's when automotive software starts to take a slightly more nuanced approach where you can't do random things and you know, where sometimes you respond in a second, sometimes you respond in 20 seconds. So yeah, that's the software part of the vehicle.
01:33:36
Speaker
And is it like a touchscreen where you see all this information, like how much fuel and what is the speed you're going at? Or is it like the traditionally of the auto tachometer, stuff like that? So it's a full-color TFT LCD display with operates at 1000 plus nits or lumens in terms of brightness. So it's visible in direct sunlight during the day. In terms of interactions, what we use is on motorcycles.
01:34:05
Speaker
Right. A lot of the feedback has to happen from your hands, which is with clubs and you can't, and you don't want the user to be, you're not taking their hands off the handlebar. Yeah. So that's why our control systems are actually based on, we simplify the user interface down to, can I operate four buttons or five buttons? Right. And that's how we have optimized the entire vehicle so that you don't have to take your hands off.
01:34:30
Speaker
the handlebar to any of these actions. And it should also work with gloves. That's another limitation when we've seen, especially with touchscreen, that it doesn't always work with gloves. It doesn't work when it's moist surfaces or dusty. So it has to work in a predictable manner. And that's where our controls come into picture. And along with this, you've got the mobile app as well.
01:34:53
Speaker
where your ownership aspects gets covered. By the motorcycle independently functions with not the app, but the app has aspects of right from scheduling service to changing certain performance requirements that you may have, which then of course gets reflected on the
01:35:11
Speaker
motorcycle, you've got navigation on the app, eco mode or something like that. Right. Yeah. I mean, some of those, you have multiple interactions on the vehicle side and on the app side, but the app is sort of their umbrella rear in terms of the ownership and the connect with the brand perspective.
01:35:29
Speaker
And there's a lot of statistics and also that comes as part of the app. In fact, all of your rides, you get a sense of, you know, how many kilometers you've covered, what's the kinds of kind of riding feedback on the riding. So just to add here, the vehicles actually have an ECIM card. So they're all connected directly to the network, right? So the data is being sort of collected, interpreted and sent back to your mobile app in real time.
01:35:54
Speaker
Okay, understood.
Financing and Long-Term Business Strategy
01:35:57
Speaker
And do you have financing tie-ups in place? Because I guess that would be like a key thing. Yeah, absolutely. So in all two-wheeler purchases, a significant portion of all these purchases are
01:36:11
Speaker
with, you know, some sort of financing support. And we do have most of the larger banks and tie-ups in place to make it easier to finance the vehicles as well as even exchange options we announced recently, I think, to facilitate, you know, a seamless transition to electric, the exciting electric. Okay. So you raised about, I guess about 40 million so far, I guess you said about 16 million till 2019 and then you're at 24 million round.
01:36:49
Speaker
So what's the way in which you see these investors getting an exit? What's your long-term vision? So I think most automotive companies, the usual sort of
01:37:05
Speaker
First of all, I think the guys who back us, they're not directly in it for the exit. They're all in it to bold to create a long-term success. But in terms of liquidity, if we talk about liquidity, then I think the usual parts, one of them is going for a listing event or in some form of lots of companies choose to stay private and go down the path of dividends. The models are changing globally.
01:37:33
Speaker
But the point in all of these cases is to build a fundamentally strong business where it is self-sustainable, where it is generating value both from a consumer point of view as well as from a shareholder point of view. And I think that's what we end up focusing on. There is no particular rush to get to that stage. I think the rush is to sort of make sure that we are delivering value to the folks who are buying the vehicles.
Advice for Aspiring Hardware Founders
01:38:04
Speaker
By what number will you be profitable? Like at 10,000 bikes, will you be profitable or will it be at 50,000 or what's the... Right. So from some gross margin perspective, the variable parts, the cost of the materials, we are already there, right? We are positive from a unit economic standpoint. Then come the stage of profitability at a plant or a factory level, which we will end up positive this year.
01:38:32
Speaker
which is recovering all of the fixed cost from our factory perspective. And then when we talk about a scale that goes beyond 10,000 is also when we become profitable at the corporate or a company level, which starts to cover even the R&D expenses and things like that. And that I think will happen through 2025 as we cross over into the next stage of growth, I'd say in the next 18 months itself.
01:38:58
Speaker
Amazing. Do you have any advice for founders who are listening to the show? I mean, you're building hardware out of India, which is, I mean, extremely rare and you yourself saw the investor response to this attempt to build hardware from India. So, you know, what advice would you like to give to aspiring partners?
01:39:19
Speaker
I just meant to be prepared also for a longer journey than a service or a software company where POCs can be built out in a few months. Here, it's going to take a few years. And I think the initial focus needs to be on having a kick-ass team that supports you and believes in your vision. It is a collective effort. It can't be done by a few individuals.
01:39:48
Speaker
a group of people to come together to sort of pull this off. Yeah. And I'd also add that whatever area that is being worked upon.
01:39:57
Speaker
Um, while, you know, the aspirations have to be ambitious and, you know, sort of dream big, it also has to be something that no matter how difficult it gets, you should be so excited about working on it that it should overcome all of those limitations, constraints, um, because you are going to end up, you know, in those kinds of situations where really back into a corner, but you still need to make progress. Right. And.
01:40:24
Speaker
Usually, we've seen this happen is that a lot of people choose to go down building certain things because it's a fad, because everyone's doing it, because it seems like the investor sentiment is there in that particular direction, because even investors tend to operate in kind of herds.
01:40:43
Speaker
There's a kind of herd mentality that happens sometimes, but those are all fads. If you are not in it because it is exciting to you, because you like or you have to be passionate about it. If you're not in it for that reason, when times get difficult, I mean, it's going to be really hard to stick to that objective.
01:41:07
Speaker
Yeah. So that's, that's our advice. And also, I think with companies like special invest and vicious, um, I think hardware is no longer seen as such a taboo in India, right? The kinds of investments that we've been seeing happen. We are so excited about it, right? Like when in 2016, if someone told us that, you know, there'd be three companies making space launch vehicles, companies making satellites.
01:41:32
Speaker
robotics companies in India, and you know, there are sufficient number of investors at the angel seed series. I mean, it actually makes us really happy that it's happening right now.
01:41:46
Speaker
And that brings us to the end of this conversation. 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. Like to be at adatthepodium.in. That's adatthepodium.in.