Deal focus: Bolt.Earth looks to close India’s EV infrastructure gap

There is a glaring – and widening – mismatch between India’s growing fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) and the number of charging piles available to serve them.

EV sales rose threefold to 1.2m in the 12 months ended March 2023 and there are currently about 9,000 public charging stations. Based on a scenario of 40% year-on-year growth, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) projects that about 106m EVs will hit the roads annually through 2030. If 400,000 charging stations are built every year – reaching 1.32m by 2030 – there will be one station for every 40 EVs.

Yet this doesn’t capture the full extent of the mismatch. Most charging station operations, led by the likes of Tata Power, focus on four-wheelers, not the two- and three-wheelers that dominate Indian mobility. Two-wheelers alone account for three-quarters of motor vehicles nationwide. The two-wheeler and three-wheeler share of those 1.2m EV sales were 63% and 33%, respectively.

Some two-wheeler EV original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) like Ola Electric Mobility and Ather Energy, have built charging networks but compatibility with non-native brands remains an obstacle. Bolt.Earth wants to fill the gap, having established a peer-to-peer network of 30,000 charging points. It claims a 70% market share, rising to 90% for two- and three-wheelers, which are the key target market.

“We launched in October 2020, just after the first wave of COVID. Ather had the only charging network for two-wheelers, and at the time, there were 50-100 points and these only worked with their own bikes. We wanted to create shared infrastructure – once the utilisation of the asset goes up, the owner reaches breakeven faster,” said Mohit Yadav, who co-founded Bolt.Earth with Jyotiranjan Harichandan.

“In two months, we had 500 charging points. We didn’t even have a sales team; we would pick up calls ourselves. And because it was P2P, it just spread. We didn’t spend much on marketing in the early days.”

Differentiated offering

The company recently announced a USD 20m funding round featuring Union Square Ventures, Prime Venture Partners, and Investment Trust of India’s ITIGO Funds, among other investors. It comes two years after a USD 4m Series A from Union Square and Prime, but Yadav said the USD 20m came in over a year ago and Bolt.Earth expects to raise another USD 15m-USD 20m in 2024.

“When we raised USD 4m, other start-ups that were just making charging points got funded as well, which didn’t work out well for us,” he explained. “We didn’t want to make a noise about the USD 20m, but now we are more confident as an organisation. We also faced some challenges when hiring and with OEMs. People would ask us, ‘How can you have such a large team with only USD 4m?’”

Bolt.Earth is Union Square’s first India investment. The US-based firm was exploring Y Combinator’s 2020-2021 intake, noticed an Indian charging station operator, and took a deeper dive into the EV infrastructure space. Bolt.Earth stood out because the P2P network is only one part of its offering; the company is positioned as a broader ecosystem player with an operating system that ties it all together.

When Yadav and Harichandan joined forces in 2017, Bolt.Earth was called Revos and its goal was to become a version of Android for EVs. Software served as the launching pad into infrastructure, and it included numerous India fixes, such as being able to function without an internet connection.

The Bolt.Earth operating system is embedded in the speedometer of an EV, part of an instrument cluster that monitors and controls functions such as battery management, door locks, indicators, and lights. The company’s 30 partner OEMs can use it to develop companion apps, stream user data to the cloud, optimise fleet operations, and develop and manage charging networks.

“People were building instrument clusters that just showed information. No one was ready to build it for us, so we developed our own hardware. We often get asked, ‘Do you sell hardware, SaaS [software-as-a-service] or infrastructure?’ We must solve for a lot of things to become a holistic platform,” said Yadav.

“The Android OS is in a phone, but there is also Google Mobile Services, Google Maps, YouTube, and the app store as well as cell towers that connect phones to the internet. Our offering is analogous to smart phones. We have an OS, we cloud services that collect data, and a charging network.”

Cultivating an ecosystem

Entry-level hardware is a 16-amp universal single socket capable of slow charging at 3.3 kilowatts. These account for 90% of the charging network, and they are intended for use at home – or anywhere a vehicle is stationary for an extended period, hence the slow charging. Bolt.Earth has made the software development kit (SDK) available to any manufacturer that wants to build the chargers.

Level-two and level-three hardware take the charging power from 7.7 KW all the way up to 90 KW, with fast charging suitable for four-wheelers and a wider variety of use cases. Bolt.Earth owns the hardware design and schematics; manufacturing is outsourced. Profit margins expand at each level, adding to income from commissions levied on transactions as a facilitator of the charging network.

The company seeded the network by distributing 5,000 level-one chargers for the token sum of INR 1 (USD 0.01) apiece. Since then, responsibility for purchasing and maintaining charging stations has fallen on the hosts looking to monetise them. Hosts range from individuals who make their own chargers available in shared parking areas to business park operators that set up multiple stations.

Hosts ensure parking and electricity are available and that the charger is functioning, and they set the price. Users can review individual stations like entries on Google Maps. Bolt.Earth offers round-the-clock customer support, despatching teams to address malfunctioning hardware that is under warranty.

“It’s a bit like Airbnb. You set up your charging point, your timing pricing. If someone is offering a great service in a great location, they should be able to charge a premium,” said Yadav. “Not many people were willing to provide hardware because there was no precedent for it, but the persona most interested in setting up a charging network is not the government, it’s the users themselves.”

With 2,000 charging points added every month, Bolt.Earth expects to be nearing 40,000 by the end of the year. The company is also looking to expand internationally, having launched pilot programmes in Africa, Thailand, and Indonesia over the past 12 months. This emphasis on accessibility dovetails with efforts to bring the cost of hardware down as low as possible without compromising on safety.

“The idea is to double down on international expansion, be it our operating system or our charging network,” Yadav added. “We give the technology to anyone who wants to build a charging network.”

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• Topics
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