Lightspeed and 3one4 Capital-backed battery charging startup Exponent Energy has raised ₹200 crore (around $20 million) in an extension to its Series B round as it shifts from building technology to scaling commercial operations across the fast-growing electric vehicle market.
The round was co-led by 360 ONE and TDK Ventures, with participation from Germany-based Hitachi Ventures. The fundraise follows a $26.4 million round led by Eight Roads Ventures back in 2023. In February this year, the company launched an EV financing subsidiary called Exponent One, raising a $2 million cheque from AdvantEdge Founders. With the new round, the company has raised a total of $82 million from venture capital investors.
Growth focus
With R&D largely behind it, the company is redirecting capital into two growth vectors: expanding its fast-charging network across cities and highways, and building a retrofitting vertical that electrifies older three-wheeler vehicles. The company has also identified 10,000 km of highway for electrification, targeting 1.6-MW charging stations capable of delivering a 15-minute top-up for EV buses doing inter-city routes.
Exponent's competitors include Pune-based Clean Electric as well as Emo Energy, and The Energy Co.
"We want to be an energy company for mobility. Specifically, we want to power up commercial vehicles," said co-founder and chief executive Arun Vinayak. In FY25, Exponent's revenue jumped 84% to ₹44 crore while losses narrowed to ₹64 crore from ₹192 crore a year ago, signalling improving unit economics as the company prepares for, according to Vinayak, rapid growth over the next two to three years.
The company focuses on providing electric vehicle (EV) charging platforms for three-wheelers and has recently begun tying up with original equipment manufacturers to fit their batteries on EV buses as well.
In the earlier years, most of the money that the company raised went into building out manufacturing capacity and capability for batteries, research and running pilot programmes to gain access to field data.
City expansion
Exponent Energy has its recharging platforms across four cities currently, Bengaluru, Chennai, Ahmedabad and Delhi. While the startup has consolidated its presence in Delhi and Bengaluru, it plans to use the money to scale in Ahmedabad and Chennai as well. Apart from these two, the company is also looking to expand into Hyderabad, Kolkata, Pune and Kochi.
Selection is being driven by three-wheeler fleet density and the relative absence of competing fuel alternatives such as Compressed Natural Gas and Liquefied Petroleum Gas.
On the three-wheeler side, Exponent's platform business, which bundles new vehicle sales through a recently announced partnership with Atul Auto alongside its retrofit offering, is expected to contribute 70 to 75% of total three-wheeler revenue. In April, the two entered into a partnership where the battery-tech startup would help develop and deploy 15,000 EV three-wheelers over a three-year period.
The retrofitting vertical alone has grown fourfold in monthly deployments since its Bengaluru launch five months ago, with ExponentOne financing a significant portion of those conversions.
For the company's business vertical, which focuses on buses, setting up charging stations across highways has been a priority since day one, said Vinayak. “We're starting with the Bengaluru-Hyderabad route because the volume is so high. Over time, we'll expand that to include routes across Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.”
The company current has 68 stations in Bengaluru, 18 in Chennai, 62 in Delhi and 10 in Ahmedabad.
In FY25, the company's revenue jumped 84% to ₹44 crore, up from ₹24 crore in the year prior. It also sharply cut losses from ₹192 crore in FY24 to ₹64 crore in FY25.