We wrote this as the new year message to our team members at Ather. On further reflection we realised that we would like our partners, owners and esp. the community to also read this. It captures the year that 2020 was for us and how we have evolved. More importantly, it covers what’s ahead for us.

Some numbers and some sensitive info has been masked here [XXX]. Very minor modifications for an easier read for an outsider. Rest of the content has been published as is.

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I hate the word ‘pivot’ but as I reflect on the last year it is hard to call it anything but a ‘pivotal’ one for us.

At the start of 2020, we were rapidly running out of road. We had stretched all our resources for years into product development but did not have much “revenue” to show for it.On the other hand our costs had been constantly growing and halting the cost escalation did not look easy. We had a product that seemed to have product-market fit but as we sharpened the business plan it was becoming more and more apparent that selling at INR 1.13L had no commercial viability.

Change #1: Product Pricing

The first bullet to bite was on the product. It was tough since product-market fit at INR 1.13L is likely ALL we had. It was tough to get together and pull up numbers to sell at positive gross margins. It meant a 50% price hike for the 450X and even at a minimum a 30% hike for the 450+ itself. But the year began with a bang with all teams pulling off a miracle to launch 450X at the shortest notice ever. We had been working on a 450 2.0 for a while but decided to go the whole hog and launch it as the X. I think the decision was made around Christmas 2019 and had demo versions, content and the rest before Jan 2020 ended. We had a great launch which allowed us to launch Ather 450X

It was of course not without our share of mistakes: at launch we were scared of the price ourselves and tried hiding behind the 99K sticker. Luckily for us the market beat the heck out of us :) which helped us find the courage necessary to embrace the price points. Closing the year, we clocked XXX pre-orders for the 450X in December and delivered XXX at the same time making December the first month ever when our revenue crossed the XXcr mark. It’s still a far cry from EBITDA profitability but the ramp up is sweet with positive margins now!

Change #2: Dev Efficiency

The second piece was to improve our efficiency. We had doubled up several departments in 2019 but somehow still felt less effective than the 2018 Ather. Key reasons: lack of focus with multiple projects and changing priorities. We had to re-organise, drive clearer reviews and targets, move from a functional style of working to a horizontal agile approach and redefine many roles internally to reduce redundancies. While there is a long, long way to go — our execution is improving. Delays have come down dramatically, planning has a nice rhythm and decent planning and financial accuracy is extremely high (our annual budgets are at 0 deviation — for the first time ever in 7 years).

Change #3: Embracing operations

Looking back at the previous years, it’s obvious that we have been a product company with limited interest in operations. In 2019 we looked everywhere to try and on-board a manufacturing partner to whom we could off-load the actual job of building vehicles (the Apple approach) and maybe one day even supply chain (the Dyson approach).

It did not work. It never could.

Building a product is not just about the design. Supply chain and manufacturing processes are an even longer part of the development journey. There are dozens of partners that need to be taken forward together and the quality of the product is ultimately controlled by how good the processes are at our partners and our own manufacturing end. More importantly in a product which is changing as fast as ours, there’s almost no partner who can move as fast as our own teams.

With that 2020 was the year when we finally embraced operations whole-heartedly. The results have been nothing short of spectacular: an almost 5X growth in capacity at ours and our partners’ end, a doubling of straight pass ratio, a 5X fall in assembly cost and numerous successful partner negotiations and improvements. The transition to Hosur before year-end was just the icing on the cake.

Not just that — operations extended into sales and charging. In the past we never could muster the courage to think beyond a city or two at a time (even in our planning) and thinking of a 100 charging points seemed a distant future. We are now present in 8 cities and growing to 19 more in the next few months. AtherGrid is expanding from 45 points at the start of the year to ~200 by March.

Looking Forward:

We are growing our sales muscles right now and 2021 is going to be the year when the entire sales process becomes a strong engine. In 2021 we are growing to grow 10X. It’s a big big target but one that will make Ather the largest EV company in the country by volume and revenue.

On the development side the big stories in ’21 will be product quality and a rethinking of our costs.

While the quality has come a long way, between us 10X-ing our scale and selling to customers beyond the early adopters, all our flaws are magnified 100X. We shouldn’t need 100% inspection, or worry about straight-pass-ratios and ideally no customer should need any servicing :)

On cost, we have chased down a whale but until we hit operational profitability, we cannot slow down. 450X has bought us precious time but for us to truly live up to our vision we need to eventually get the entire market to go electric. And that’s a ton of rethinking of our designs and processes — the kind that only an integrated company like Ather can. If we don’t make the 450 products sustainable, nobody can.

The experiments of 2020 have convinced us of the benefits of an empowered swimlane and an agile style of product development. With that in mind, we will improve our goal-setting and performance management system to commit better to a cross-functional style of working across Ather.

Finally on operations, there’s tons of work to stabilize Hosur and our suppliers. We haven’t had more than a few weeks when we have not been supply-constrained. Way too much of our time still goes into managing our supply chain and in pulling materials out. On the sales side, we know the experience that we want to give to our customers — it was working reasonably well when we were selling a handful of vehicles/month. But with a 10X-ing of scale we will need to sharpen our focus and learn new tricks: better tools and automation, better processes, more training. Expect a full blown program to preserve and improve the customer experience and clearer goals on that front this year.

Ending note:

We had years when we wrote about how the 450 was growing up. This is the year when Ather grows up.

Exciting times!

2021 — Growing up! was originally published in Ather Energy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At launch, we explained 450X’s improved performance, the significantly improved dashboard, about the super fast charging, our expansion plans etc. We spent some time explaining a new way of owning the 450X — subscriptions. Subscriptions that include the cost of battery, data, software upgrades, fast charging etc. and which allow us to guarantee a ridiculously high level of consistency in performance that no EV maker is offering.

But we missed explaining two things:

1. Ather 450 is not discontinued and will be sold as Ather 450X + (yes, it even gets a longer name now)
2. That we were increasing the price for Ather 450

So some backstory first

Back in 2018 when we were gearing up to launch the Ather 450 for the first time we had to take a wild guess on what pricing would work. The 110cc petrol scooter market was at 75K and your average lead acid electric scooter was even worse at a price point of 40K. None of these price points were feasible for a good electric scooter in India. We took a bet and launched Ather 450 at 1.25L.

We had no way of making money at that price point, 5kW motors alone would cost you 25–30K and batteries nearly 75K, before you bring in the rest of the vehicle into the mix. And without volumes on day 1, it was a massacre.

We were losing more money than we charged as revenues. Even on things like connectivity services, servicing, Ather was establishing a brand new benchmark with first of its kind OTA software upgrades, first of its kind fast public charging and door-step service and no questions asked servicing commitment. All of this costed 2-5X of what we were pricing them at.

And we were okay with it.

We like taking long-term bets with what we do at Ather. While the cost of everything was higher we had a sense that all of it becomes cheaper as you throw more and more engineering and product brains on it. Volumes will also help of course. So we stuck with the pricing.

Over the course of the last year our costs improved dramatically on all fronts. But as things started to stabilize, we realized that at the existing price the scooter itself wasn’t going to be sustainable. Globally our best competitors were producing at higher cost points for comparable specs despite already having significant volumes. Even existing legacy OEMs have gone on record to acknowledge that EVs at existing price points are still nonviable at scale. And this despite having lower performance, charging and connectivity specs than the Ather 450 and 450X.

The market had to move up. We had to increase the price of Ather 450.

Not to suddenly mint money, but to start breaking-even. Due to the success of the 450, Ather is an important influence in the Indian EV market. The ecosystem is looking at how we grow. If we are not willing to prove that people will pay fair price for an experience like the 450 then it’s hard for the market to really believe that electric is here and inevitable. And while I am glad that we finally have credible EVs coming out post the 450 launch, I also believe that the primary purpose of Ather is to not sit back and compete but push the boundaries of what electric and connected can do.

That’s what Ather 450 did originally in 2018 and that’s what 450X does again. Today, one of the quickest scooters in India is electric. One of the smartest scooters globally is an Indian product. The first scooter with 4G, the first with an aluminium chassis, the first one to move to Android. It’s an Indian electric scooter that’s brought in the concepts of leasing, subscriptions, infinite warranties, software upgrades and much more to the market.

Electric is no longer playing catch-up with its petrol variants. Electric is leading the market. That’s what you get when you buy the Ather 450 series. And I am glad that we can finally do that and build a sustainable business in India.

What we missed explaining during the launch of Ather 450X was originally published in Ather Energy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After 4 years, 55 prototypes, 50K kms in on-road testing and over a million man hours the S340 is finally ready!

And this one is not a render or a concept for a show. It’s rolling off an actual production line as we speak.

The last time we wrote about timelines was in Jan 2017. That’s when we explained how we underestimated the challenges of validation and getting from a prototype to a production-worthy piece. For us 2017 has been about fixing those pieces for the product: from working with our supplier partners and getting the process quality right to stabilizing our internal systems.

And it has reflected in the S340. Things we had in mind while unveiling the proto but the vehicle did not have back then — a charging port, on-board charger, storage space, not sucky UI, waterproof dashboard, waterproof battery, waterproof charger, tooled up components, under seat light, regenerative braking, service scheduling, EMI protection, charging pod, motor cooling, CBS, Over-the-Air Updates, diagnostic alerts, parking assist, push navigation, charging locations tracking…it’s a pretty long list and a pretty important one to build out.

Early this year we finally started receiving pre-production components from our 100+ suppliers and vendors and our assembly line came up in Whitefield, Bengaluru. Vehicle trial production is running right now and we are planning to commence commercial production in July.

For us the S340 has never been only about the vehicle, but it is about your complete ownership experience — from purchase to after sales. When you have enough computing power baked into your design from the get-go, then how you track and schedule servicing, how and when you recharge, your reason to purchase itself — they all change. We have worked hard to ensure that we deliver on that superior ownership experience with the very first vehicle that we put on the road. Hence, not just your riding experience but your charging experience matters to us, your purchase experience matter to us, the servicing experience matters to us.

Over the coming months a couple of things are going to happen, so expect more announcements from us:

1. In May — our charging infrastructure is going live in Bengaluru. We are keeping it under wraps. However, installations have already commenced in Bengaluru. And yep, these stations will have fast charging capability installed from day 1.
2. In June — In June, we will open up the pre-order window for the S340 for our Bengaluru customers. Around this time, we will also open our first Experience Center at Indiranagar in Bengaluru. You will be able to take test rides here and spend time with our teams.
3. All throughout — we will be getting more and more sentimental as this baby starts walking.

Soon after deliveries commence in Bengaluru, we will kick-start our plans to launch in other cities. We will announce our plans to launch in other cities later this year.

Finally, the S340 is a personification of years of work by a team that believes that it can build great experiences right here in India. That customers will pay for a superior product even if it’s built without a legacy. That engineering and product comes first. That it’s important to build it right — Move Fast and Don’t Break Things.

We hope you love it.

Exciting times ahead!

Tarun (tarun.m@atherenergy.com)

It’s Alive! It’s Alive! was originally published in Ather Energy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I wanted to jot down some of these realizations and this is one of the first essays on that.

In one of his classes at Stanford (the collection of which is the book ‘Zero to One’) he talks about the question of luck and uses that to debate the state of startups and economies in general. He used that discussion to break a vision into four types:

1. Determinate Optimism: You have a firm view of the future — you have a clear vision and you are optimistic about it. eg: we will have flying cars in the future, we will have space colonies. Optimistic and clear views. Allows you to bet on a approach and go all-in on it.
2. Determinate Pessimism: You have a firm view of the future and you are pessimistic about it. You know the future is all about urbanization and even as you get there you don’t believe that it is going to end well. It’s a bleak world and you are preparing yourself to minimize the impact.
3. Indeterminate Optimism: You are optimistic about the future — future will be better than today. But you have no idea how. Will it be autonomous cars or no cars? Will it be solar energy or geo-thermal? You can’t be sure so you bet on multiple approaches and hope for the best. Or you pivot rapidly.
4. Indeterminate Pessimism: You don’t know the future and you don’t think it is going to end well. You know the good times are behind you and you might as well as enjoy the faint glow of the past glory rather than think or prepare about the future because you don’t know which direction it is headed anyway.

The difference between determinate and indeterminate world views is the more important difference here. It’s the difference between ‘planning the future’ and ‘planning for a future’. Thiel describes it best:

The math version is calculus vs. statistics. In a determinate world, calculus dominates. You can calculate specific things precisely and deterministically. When you send a rocket to the moon, you have to calculate precisely where it is at all times. It’s not like some iterative startup where you launch the rocket and figure things out step by step. Do you make it to the moon? To Jupiter? Do you just get lost in space?

With calculus, you can calculate things far into the future. You can even calculate planetary locations years or decades from now. But there are no specifics in probability and statistics — only distributions. In these domains, all you can know about the future is that you can’t know it.

We can use this framework to understand a startup also. Often we describe an opportunity as opposed to stating a world view when we start.

1. Opportunity: We can be an Uber for X. Does not describe a state of the industry or the world. Is far more self descriptive which makes it limiting in scope.
2. World view: Transportation is going to be a service in the future. Describes a state of the industry in the future. Allows one to chase different opportunities in this world — one could build an Uber or work on self-driving vehicles as ownership interest drops. The foundation is far stronger and is not linked to the existence of a start-up. It’s an inevitable world view.

I find the way of describing a world view as opposed to talking about an opportunity far more attractive while stating a vision. It lets one ‘build for an inevitable world view’ as opposed to ‘chasing an opportunity’. Building is more attractive and feels less like work.

When describing in terms of opportunities a change in strategy can seem existential. Easier to lose firm footing when the opportunity shifts. In the above example, if Uber’s business model comes under question then one will start worrying about their ‘Uber for X’ approach. On the other hand, in the second example it’s easier to find agreement on a definite world view: transportation as a future.

The opportunistic world view ends up limiting the ability to imagine the future. You end up looking around you and project from it. One gets pushed to craft a strategy around the realities of eco-system, funding and timelines as opposed to pinning the vision down and working on solving all other variables.

We can see many good example around us. Great companies are cults that believe strongly in their purpose — the ‘world view’ that they believe in, and that purpose by definition implies a clear view of the world that they are building. It does not matter how far the ‘world view’ is or the pivots in the strategy itself to get there — what matters is that you get to chase the same thing.

Those companies become temples for the team to chase that world view together as opposed to actually becoming a corporate indistinguishable from the next one. They are founded not because folks wanted to be independent or get rich but because they wanted to forge that world themselves.

These are some early thoughts and I am quite aware that many companies develop the ‘world view’ in hind-sight as opposed to necessarily starting from it. Also there’s no reason the believe that companies chasing an opportunity don’t grow large or cannot be great places to work at. But maybe they don’t become cults.

Ping me if you have thoughts on this on tarun@atherenergy.com.

As our hiring volume increases we have been facing what many people tell me is a very real issue in the wider Indian eco-system: people reneging on offers at the very last minute. It is quite rampant at surprisingly all levels (I thought people dumping companies for their MBAs/post-grads in campus placements was as bad as it got). This bugs me quite a lot and we don’t want to walk out of this with no learning. There is always something to learn and improve from.

At the start of Ather’s journey the folks who joined us came out of sheer passion. What they did here could barely be called a ‘job’ in the sense that we paid next to nothing (basis sustenance of about 20–25K/month for the entire first year) and had very loosely defined roles. Everybody who found their way in was a builder and were amazed that they could do build vehicles like this post college too. It was a beautiful phase and it lasted for a long while at Ather. Even after raising our Series A funding of $12M Ather was not a big paymaster. We never have been. There’s much more that you gain at Ather and the sheer joy of building cannot be easily valued. Most of the senior leaders took deep salary cuts to join Ather as did many of the young engineers too. Hiring was hard because we were sitting in Bangalore in the boom of 2015 where the market was in a frenzy and unless you were truly sold on Ather you wouldn’t even consider us.

Eventually, we started correcting for the market and post our Series B started matching some (though not all) of the industries. Getting people in who can help us get to the next stage without making literally all the classic startup/product company mistakes is important and so we have been on the look-out of talent and experience much more than ever before.

Soon we were meeting seriously talented folks who on paper could do all that Ather needed in that role and sometimes more. The competency fit could not be better. These are exceptional folks and we were investing a large amount of time pitching to them. Somewhere down this path we started to realize that we were pitching to folks who did not truly want to join Ather. But they were willing to consider our ‘offer’. Either 6 days/week was too much, or the compensation hike was not the highest or the stocks were ‘too’ much and could be traded for more cash. We pursued and sweetened our offers. Then we pushed them quite a lot to get out of their current jobs asap. Then we waited for 2–3 months and kept engaging with them and then finally a day before the joining date they would develop personal issues. Or they got another better offer. Or they decided that they wanted to start-up on their own.

To be clear, I am sure some of those cases were genuine and there’s only so much one can push for. And maybe what we are seeing is not worse than what the industry sees in general. But there’s an important learning still — startups should stop and reconsider if they find themselves selling themselves too much to a potential candidate. Pitch the vision, pitch the opportunity, pitch the product but maybe pause and reconsider if:

• the person is stuck for weeks on the details.
• if she is willing to drop you for comp alone. A healthy compensation is important but is the candidate pained that we are unable to make this work only because of compensation or is she totally cool dropping you? Does she smile and get back only if you get to a 40% hike?
• the person is too focused on their competencies and has no strong interest in the company’s vision. For a purpose driven company that passion has no alternative.
• the person has done all this and more at another place (another starup perhaps?) and believes that this is no hard challenge. He’s been there and done that and is willing to ‘help’ you out but your offer has to make sense for him to consider this. Nothing wrong with the person at all but then our company is not at the right place to attract them yet. They will inevitable find a way to get to something more ‘exciting’ before joining or (no!!!) within months of joining.

It’s a tricky place. Finding somebody who’s at the right point in his career to find this ridiculously exciting (yes, ridiculous is the word) and finds himself to be such a good cultural fit that he is almost conflicted if the offer isn’t in the top 75% percentile and it is he who wants to make it work. Yeah, almost a mythical creature. I hear all of us are anyway chasing to become one these days :)

Launch the product already!

We have been getting a lot of mail from our enthusiasts and EV lovers. Some are restless (“Been holding off my purchase of a scooter for the last 6 months!”), others have offered good advice (“The market will move if you don’t start test rides soon”) and some are genuinely worried (“Petrol companies will kill you if you don’t hurry up”).

It’s a mixed blessing, to have such a passionate community. Such a community deserves open communication, which comes easy to us. You don’t have to look far but our open houses, blogs, posts and social media announcements till date are examples enough. And so will be the timelines.

Back in February, 2016 we unveiled the S340 and announced that we will be starting test rides by second half of the year and production by end of the year followed by shipping in early 2017. What we had already built by that time was a prototype that could achieve the performance specs, the looks that we intended and the system intelligence was upcoming. This was an incredibly fast build-out as this particular platform started taking shape only by mid-2014 and the team had put together a lot in merely 18 months.

While we did begin limited beta test-rides and open house interactions in the second half of this year, we have as of today pushed our production date by at least a year.

Why the change?

It’s the same reason why we could start an auto company in India in the first place — we under anticipated the challenge. Heavily.

Building a completely new product, development typically takes around 6–8 years. And that’s usually on the back of a fairly stable platform, existing technology and established operations. We wanted to compress the process into a much shorter span. But we under-anticipated a couple of things.

• Being a new product, we don’t have years of customer and field data. Working around that, (testing on the bench and in the field) meant we took longer than we thought it would.
• Also, building a vertically integrated company has meant that we are practically our own suppliers, putting the entire reliability, design and manufacturability in our hands. While this end-to-end control is exactly what we wanted — it comes at a large upfront time investment.
• A first attempt meant that we are doing technology development in parallel with product development — and that’s hard to parallelize.

Building a product like this in the first pass requires an engineering and operations team that runs like a well-oiled machine and has all the systems in place. A team that would have the capability to work on a new platform and technology in India and go through an entirely new product introduction journey. For us building this team and these systems is probably the single most valuable outcome of our efforts.

What does it mean?

Make no mistake — we do feel shitty about not being able to predict the time to market better. We could have understood the need for experience and a larger team early on and could have predicted timelines better. But one learns. The last year has been a great humbling experience for us as the true weight of building a product company and an engineering organization has dawned on us.

Being product-people nothing would get us more excited than seeing our product in your hands. And we are working hard towards it. Ather is important and not just to us. We believe, what we are building is very critical for the eco-system and we cannot falter.

A strong foundation for the year ahead

While these realizations and course corrections happened, we did lay a strong foundation for an accelerated growth in the year ahead.

We grew. From 75 people in Jan 2016 to 175 people today — this is one of the largest EV efforts in the country now. Honestly, hiring engineers with some serious product development experience has been one of our biggest challenges. Fortunately, we have been joined by experienced professionals with diverse skill sets across our team. It doesn’t stop here. We will be doubling our count in the next 18 months and there are already 60+ open positions across teams. You, your friend or someone in your circle might be a great fit at Ather. Feel free to let them know. You can check the opportunities here.

We raised a round — $31M led by Hero Moto Corp marking the first time an Indian auto OEM has invested in a domestic hardware startup. If you missed out the last blog on the funding story here you go: Series B blog

We started beta test rides and open houses across Bangalore and Chennai. Over 90 + of our enthusiast have already test-ridden the S340. And we have had the pleasure of interacting with 500 + folks in these two cities. We did put a pause on these two events since all prototypes have been currently allocated to different teams for testing. Expect to hear from the team on these events soon.

Testing, testing & testing. Our last two prototypes together clocked close to 10,000 kms of test rides. In parallel, all our sub-systems too have been put through strenuous testing at our facilities.

And (some mandatory pat on the back after a recap post) ET Start-up Awards recognised us under the Best on Campus Startup category, Frost & Sullivan presented us with 2016 India Electric Mobility Technology Innovation Leadership Award and IESA (India Electronics and Semiconductor Association) and TiE at their recent IOT Next conference honored us with theMost Inspiring Startup Impacting Automotive Award.

As work continues to happen we will share more details with you. We are also sure that you will have many more questions on this topic and/or might even want to come see. You are more than welcome. Feel free to reach out to me directly on tarun.m@atherenergy.com or info@atherenergy.com if you have any general queries. (Trust me you will get a human written response to your mails on this one too).

Exciting times ahead!
Tarun

Originally published at www.atherenergy.com on January 21, 2017.

The roller-coaster that was 2016 was originally published in Ather Energy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of our big learnings over the last three years has been that at Ather we are not just building the S340 but we are participating in the growth of an entire new industry with completely new technology, new platforms and with a very different vendor and re-fueling infrastructure. A vision like that needs work on not just a product but the entire eco-system. We have to build not just for one product launch but for scale and long-term sustainability. Accordingly, we have always been cognizant about our capital requirements and have been lucky in the past to have had phenomenal investors like Tiger Global and Sachin and Binny Bansal.

Today we are happy to announce our latest round of fund-raising. This is what is known in the industry as a ‘Series B’ round of financing. In this round we have raised $27M to continue our engineering and production work for the S340 and our efforts with an ubiquitous charging infrastructure. However, what’s interesting about this round was that the primary investor in this round was Hero MotoCorp.

Yes, the largest 2W company in the world and one deeply invested in petrol vehicles. This is quite a departure from our previous investors list and in fact this is the first time our investor list includes an automobile veteran.

Hero understands where the future of vehicles is headed. And this change will be quite a rapid one which will change the landscape of this industry. One cannot sit on the side-lines. One cannot not participate. A company of their size cannot move like a start-up but as Rajat from their team often says, they can ‘think like a start-up’. And in this case participate in the growth of one.

We are a young company. This has allowed us to rethink design, specs, our entire approach even. However the auto industry is highly evolved in many processes, quality systems and supply-chain management. With Hero as an investor on-board we hope to fast forward years of learning in those and grow rapidly.

Does this change anything? Does it mean we will change our strategy? Or distribution model? Should you expect a change in the product? Is this an acquisition?

No. Both Ather and Hero have different approaches and have chartered different paths. But more importantly the industry is just building up and we believe start-ups like ours will lead the change — we need to build a new narrative, a new story. Different from the one that the old world built up so admirably. Competing on parameters that the incumbents do not compete on. This new story deserves a new company.

One thing both of us believe very strongly is in sticking with our respective paths and staying with the vision. We started Ather with a vision to build India’s largest EV company. This investment if anything only helps us accelerate that journey. Exciting times ahead.

Tarun and Swapnil.

Post Tags:

• Series B
• Funding
• Hero MotoCorp

Originally published at www.atherenergy.com on October 27, 2016.

Series B funding and more was originally published in Ather Energy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The last few months have been especially active for us:

1. We raised our seed round of capital from Sachin and Binny Bansal of Flipkart:

Ather has been fairly capital-efficient and had raised one round of capital in February from Dr. V Srinivasan (founder, Aerospike — himself a pioneer of databases in the Silicon Valley) and the Technology Development Board, GoI. Before that Ather had been supported by Dr. Krishna Kumar and the Department of Engineering Design at IIT Madras and later by the IIT Madras Incubation Center.

In this round, Ather has raised $1m from Sachin and Binny Bansal, co-founders of Flipkart. Mr. Raju Venkatraman, CEO and MD of Medall and a serial entrepreneur is also a co-investor.

It is very important for a start-up to have like-minded investors backing it. Product design and automobile manufacturing is a hard business and more so for a start-up. Ather has been lucky to have continually attracted investors with a powerful vision. Sachin and Binny are completely aligned with our thinking about the future and fully back us on our product and go-to-market plans. They share our excitement about this space and also believe in our vision of building a great product first. We could not have asked for better investors at the product development stage.

This funding will be used primarily for product and technology development. The target is to prototype and test several dozen versions so that when we launch the customer experience is flawless.

2. Work began on the clay model for the scooter:

A lot of our layout work is nearing closure. Over the last few weeks the team has been busy on a full-scale clay model of the vehicle. This will allow us to freeze down on the looks and the ergonomics of the vehicle perfectly.

Here’s a peak into it! Also, NDTV covered us recently on this.

3. We are opening a design center in Bangalore:

We are opening a brand new design center in Indiranagar, Bangalore. This marks an important step in our history as this would be Ather’s first independent office.Test-rides will begin from this location and we will be soon extending invitations for tours of the same!

Expect a lot of updates in 2015. From the launch of our first test-rides to a pre-order campaign, 2015 will mark the year when we lift the kimono over the product completely and bring the best scooter in the country to the market.

May the energy be with you!

Originally published at www.atherenergy.com on February 1, 2016.

Funding, clay models and a new design center! was originally published in Ather Energy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I wrote this sometime back as a mail to one of my seniors (Achal). Later I found some of the concepts here so alluring that I started digging more on them. This led me to write a trilogy on Google’s strategy itself. You can find it here:
@Google’s music and the shotgun approach to world domination — part 1
@Google’s music and the shotgun approach to world domination — part 2
@Google’s music and the shotgun approach to world domination — part 3

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Uber was started in 2009 by Garret Camp and Travis Kalanick — both successful entrepreneurs with company sales (StumbleUpon and Red Swoosh respectively) under them.
The basic idea was to have a luxury car at your call. However, since the Apple-led era of smartphone apps was already underway, instead of a call they decided to opt for an app interface instead of ‘the call’. This also ensured that their customers were not only the rich, but also the well connected ones.
Initially the founders themselves would ferry people and sales were really limited. They did not grasp it initially but their iPhone app idea was the biggest killer here and opened up doors to hitherto unthought of possibilities. Notice that the company was originally called ‘UberCab’. The founders eventually figured out that there was a vast possibility outside the cab market in future. More on that later.
Participating drivers were given an iPhone with in-built software that would manage customers request. A backend was built using Google Maps API to connect the nearest driver to the customer. This suddenly cascaded and meant that now people can also figure out where the nearest driver was and how much time he would take to reach them (since Google Maps started implementing the traffic layer, this was a no-brainer). This also meant that you could track your vehicle in real time.
Bringing everything to the app also meant that everything became digital. Meters, billing, tips — everything moved to the app and got linked to your Uber account. This also meant that people actually need not pay with physical money — you could just link your credit card and everything was paid automatically. This had another unexpected benefit, one which is of supreme importance and value to corporate clients — bills. Everything was maintained in Uber servers and so you could just keep on piling on the rides and at the end of the month take a single bill print out and submit it to your company accounts. That’s it! No need to keep a track of all bills, no need to worry whether the taxi will give a bill or not in the first place, faster rides etc.
Waiting time is fixed to 3 mins after which Uber automatically charges you a $5 waiting fee. This ensures that people cannot play with the service and the driver’s time (anyways the payment is deducted straight from your credit card and you can see the meter rolling away on your app). This also ensures that only those people who are in a hurry end up getting a Uber cab. Acts like a filter for useless customers.
Uber has a fairly decent ‘stat’ team in-house to crunch all the data that they are collecting from their cars and their apps. The stats are currently being used to match supply to demand and price the taxis accordingly, currently.
Uber ends up charging at least 1.5 times more than a regular taxi, but for that you get so many upsides that for most people it’s worth it: A reduced waiting time (some of us might have a hard time to believe this in India, but apparently in areas like Boston getting a taxi can be very, very hard. Plus, you get to travel in a nice car and get the feel that you are connected since everything is happening via a smartphone app.
While it is said that the name was changed from ‘UberCab’ to ‘Uber’ under pressure from the San Fransisco Municipal Transportation Agency. My personal belief is that it had a lot to do with the founders realizing that Uber need not be only a cab facilitation service. That is reflected in the kind of valuation VCs have put up with in it’s latest round ($3.76B) and also in the kind of ‘promotional’ services Uber had started running in recent times. For example, Uber recently ran Ice-cream trucks with the same app that people used to hail Uber cabs. You press a button and an ice cream truck would come down. Uber is trying to be, in the words of its founder, ‘an instant gratification service’. You press a button and things appear. No waiting, no delays, no on-the-spot payments, no reservations. Think package deliveries, food, furniture, parcels etc.

This also explains why Google shelled out quite a lot of money for getting a stake in Uber. Why would primarily a search-engine company otherwise invest in a taxi company? (you might find some of my previous articles on Google interesting at this point @Google’s music and the shotgun approach to world domination — part 1).
The basic premise is simple: put a stupid GPS on everything that moves, collect every ounce of data that you can and share it with your customers. Make things transparent and give people the power of data. The eco-system will in due time figure out what to do with that data. In Uber’s case it looks like the eco-system will evolve to use that data for ‘instant gratification’.
The possibilities of that last thought are enormous..

relevant links:

1. http://blog.uber.com/2010/12/22/...
2. http://www.inc.com/business-trav...
3. The New Car Service Company Uber Exposes the Idiocy of American Cities’ Taxi Regulations
4. http://themayreport.com/2013/04/...
5. Why You Can’t Get a Taxi
6. Uber (company)
7. http://www.businessinsider.in/Th...