Trisha Medhi ( )
From their collective experience at electric vehicle startups Ather Energy and Micelio, Rahul Lamba, Prashant Rathee, and Pratik Somani realised that while EV mobility space is gaining traction, batteries are the single most limiting factor for people to adopt clean mobility.
“Slow charging and dreadfully low life span (two to three years) are keeping people away from buying EVs. Add to this a high finance rate and low second-hand value of batteries that make vehicle ownership even riskier,” says Prashant, CPO, of The Energy Company told YourStory.
The challenges with batteries compound for commercial EV users due to long hours of driving.
The trio decided to find a way to make batteries last longer, and this led to the birth of .
Founded in 2021, The Energy Company is a deep-tech startup building a full-stack battery platform–Flexi for mobility, which the founders hope, will increase EV adoption.
Combining hardware and SaaS
Flexi offers fast and adaptable charging, just like smartphones, to address issues like range anxiety, safety and reliability, the founders say.
Flexi has two elements. FlexiPack is a battery pack that integrates into any EV to provide fast charging agnostic to the charger type. The customised battery pack can be fast charged in under 15 minutes to cover a distance of 50 kilometres and 40 minutes for 100 kilometres. Existing standard batteries take four to six hours to fully charge.
The Energy Company is a full-stack battery platform
FlexiPack is designed for both electric two-wheelers and e-rickshaws. One can also charge the battery using a three-pin 15 amp socket at home in under one hour for a 100 km range.
“It is completely modular across different vehicle categories. In fact, in its current stage, it can be integrated with more than 60% of the two-wheeler EVs in the market,” Rahul, who is the CEO of The Energy Company, says.
The startup has also designed FlexiTwin, which is a digital twin of FlexiPack and a SaaS platform that digitally records the battery performance, degradation, and service history.
“Our SaaS platform ensures superior control over batteries and makes sure they are ready to be deployed in second-life applications,” says Rahul.
FlexiTwin is in its development phase and the startup has started to roll out beta trials with few of its existing and new customers.
Market opportunities and traction
The India lithium-ion battery market was valued at $1.66 billion in 2020, and it is expected to reach $4.85 billion by 2027, registering a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 17.23% during the forecast period of 2022-2027.
The Bengaluru-based startup manufactures its battery pack in-house and plans to start commercialisation by August 2023. Currently it has 12 clients including fleet operators and retail OEMs across India.
The startup is in the pre-revenue stage and is in talks with vehicle OEMs for collaboration.
In March this year, the startup raised an undisclosed amount of pre-Seed funding from LetsVenture, Sia Angels, and We Founder Circle (WFC) along with other marquee angel investors.
The funds will be used to acquire more customers, expand the team, and ramp up production.
The startup competes with players like Log9 Materials and Exponent Energy.
