Amritsar-based EV logistics platform eBikeGo on Thursday said it has raised $1.5 million in pre-Series A round from a group of overseas and Indian investors.
Bollywood Singer Sukhbir Singh, Dr Brahmanand Mohanty (Professor at Asian Institute of Technology), Alparslan Kutukcuoglu (Chairman Of The Board at Mungo Befestigungstechnik AG), Vijay Sivaram (CEO at Quess Corp Limited), Sameer Bulchandani (MD at Avdel India), and Sumant Singhal (CEO at Chiripal Poly Films), among others, participated in the round.
Last year, the startup had raised $0.7 million through an angel round led by Rajesh Sawhney of GSF Accelerator, Rohit Chanana of Sarcha Advisors, Girish Chitale, Startup Buddy, and other angel investors, most of whom also participated in the current round.
eBikeGo plans to scale to 30 cities, touch 20 million deliveries, and save 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2022 while continuing to be an asset-light business. It partners with franchisee owners, NBFCs, and OEMs through asset leasing models, and can consistently offer over 25 percent IRR to asset partners due to high asset utilisation and lower operations and maintenance costs, the statement said.
Started in 2019, eBikeGo is a shared EV-based last-mile logistics and micro-mobility platform that aggregates last-mile delivery for all prominent companies in ecommerce, food delivery, groceries, and urban mobility, who outsource their last-mile to the startup.
It has also partnered with local neighbourhood merchants and kirana chains to transform their delivery operations with a tech-based delivery platform, powered by the EV advantage of the clean mode of delivery with time and cost economics.
“Currently, our e-bikes are doing about 275,000 deliveries and saving close to 30 tons of CO2 every month. With 10X growth expected in the next 12 months, and a 10,000 EV bike fleet strong platform, we aim to make a significant impact on the environment, and drive significant value to any business that is looking to scale up their delivery operations,” added Irfan Khan, Co-founder and CEO, eBikeGo.
As per a 2020 McKinsey report, the Indian two-wheeler market is going to see 25 percent EV penetration by 2030, the highest across all vehicle segments. This implies that close to 1.5 to 2 crore EV two-wheelers will be on the road in the next 10 years time, about 30 percent of which will be contributed by delivery and micro-mobility players.
“But this change won’t happen by itself. Someone has to develop an ecosystem – with charging infrastructure, battery swapping supply chain, service stations, etc. We have taken a significant lead in creating an enabling ecosystem through super low cost and IoT-enabled charging points and battery swapping infrastructure,” he added.
eBikeGo is also in talks with a few prominent clean energy and logistics-tech focussed funds to raise a larger round and grow at a rapid scale.
Beyond India, eBikeGo is planning to expand to South Africa, Sri Lanka, and a few other markets by partnering with local companies through a platform-as-a-service model.