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In India, it’s not hard to find a two-wheeler fitted with jugaad to carry excess load. Whether it’s the milkman carrying cans, small vendors transporting supplies, or the gig workforce delivering your food and groceries, carriers help micro-entrepreneurs maximise their revenue. 

However, loading the bike with such additional weight is not just illegal, but can also lead to fatal accidents. Around 10% of all accidents in India happen due to overloading, according to the Ministry of Road, Transport, and Highways. 

Nashik-based Revamp Moto has been working on this problem statement since January 2021. Founded by Jayesh Tope, Pritesh Mahajan, and Pushkaraj Narendra Salunke, the startup offers electric two-wheelers adapted with Modular Utility Platforms.

Solving for pain points

The founders had worked separately on electric vehicle (EV) projects in their college, with a dream of becoming entrepreneurs.

“We have been working on EV projects since 2019 and tried to enter the mass mobility market, but failed,” Jayesh Tope, Founder and Managing Director of Revamp Moto, tells YourStory.

He joined Mahindra Group as Project Engineer after college, and later ventured into building an agritech supply chain company during the pandemic when the need for fresh goods arose.

Seeing farmers use their bikes for multiple activities like transporting produce or spraying fertiliser, Tope realised that micro-entrepreneurs, including tea vendors, food sellers, and delivery persons, use two-wheelers for multiple use cases. 

He went back to his college project and reworked the EV design. He met Mahajan and Salunke, who were also working in the EV segment, through a mentor from DISQ incubation centre.

While doing their research, they realised that micro-entrepreneurs struggled with limited cargo space, lower quality of vehicles, inefficiency in fleet management, and greater breakdown time. They needed to be empowered not just in terms of product and service, but financial assistance as well.

The founders aimed to build a multi-utility bike that offers multiple mounting positions to accommodate various types of goods.

“We saw this as an opportunity, scrapped the initial design, and pivoted to this particular segment in May 2020,” adds Tope. 

Product 

The startup has designed two electric bike models.

RM Buddy is a low-speed EV with five different attachments for different daily needs. It has a range of 70 km and 120 kg of payload capacity. The second vehicle, RM Mitra, is an all-electric bike with a range of 130-140 km and a payload capacity of 200 kg. 

Revamp Moto’s batteries can be swapped or charged at home. Tope says they are portable, meaning they can be charged separately or in the vehicle. It has a charging time of three to four hours.

Though Mitra will be launched a couple of months later, the company will fulfill the first 100-200 deliveries of Buddy through B2B tie-ups by March, said the founder. 

Revamp Moto’s patented swappable accessory modules enable users to carry crates, milk cans, food delivery bags, parcel bags, huge boxes, water cans, etc.

The vehicles are equipped with an IoT telematics unit, which powers the bike along with various low-powered appliances. It comes with swappable battery packs and claims a performance of 0-40  kmph in 6.7 sec. 

For B2B deliveries, the bikes are equipped with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform coupled with the telematics unit. The fleet operator will be provided with a dashboard for real-time communication with the bike for metrics such as capacity, range, current location, and faults, if any. The fleet can be managed remotely, with the startup also offering a premium plan wherein the operations are automated. 

The company has undertaken a couple of pilots with shared mobility giants, last-mile deliveries, and ecommerce firms including Swiggy, Rebel Foods, Domino’s, Licious, Vogo, and Bude to name a few. 

Through its Nashik-based contract assembly partner Panache DigiLife, a listed manufacturing company, Revamp Moto is primed with an annual production capacity of 1.5 lakh EVs. The startup is at a pre-revenue stage and hasn’t made sales yet.

Revamp Moto competes with other players in the industry like TVS Superxl, Hero Electric Nyx, and River.

Shark Tank exposure

Revamp Moto raised a total of a million dollars in 2022, including from Shark Tank India judges boAt Co-founder Aman Gupta, People Group Founder Anupam Mittal, Lenskart CEO Peyush Bansal, and Ashneer Grover, ex-MD at PhonePe.

VCATS, Veda VC, Maharashtra government, Capital A, and angel investors, including Deven Bhandari of Bhandari Group and Ashwin Kandoi of Winjit Technologies have also invested in the company. 

Tope says the reality TV show helped them solve the challenge of building from a Tier-II city. While Nashik gives the 40-membered team a good understanding of the market, lower cash burn, focused product innovation, and government support, building a tech and business team based out of Tier II city was a challenge. 

“But Shark Tank India gave us a good leverage, wherein people have left their high-paying jobs from BSH, Mahindra, Ola, etc., and joined revamp for a vision,” Tope says. 

Nashik is also isolated from the startup ecosystem. The founders keep travelling to Bengaluru, Pune, and Mumbai every month to meet the stakeholders and stay connected. 

Market and future

India is expected to sell 22 million electric two-wheelers by 2030, according to a report by Redseer Strategy Consultants.

Predominantly a two-wheeler market, India’s EV penetration is at 3%, while the report noted that four-wheeler-dominated markets of the US and China have a penetration of 63% and 56%, respectively. Though the electrification of mobility in India is still at a nascent stage, there is massive headroom for growth, it noted.

“Our holistic mission is to reach at least one million lives by 2025,” shares Tope. “To reach this goal, we want to bring in at least two lakh vehicles on the road by 2025.”

By the next financial year, the team aims to sell 40,000 vehicles of both models. The company also has long-term plans to enter the three-wheeler utility market. 

“We aim to be a facilitator and connect the dots at our level for micro-entrepreneurs,” he adds. 

Revamp Moto also aims to help facilitate seed capital for micro-entrepreneurs and is already in talks with various banks for a partnership on finance. 

“We will sell EVs but the social impact has to be huge and we want to empower customers at the bottom of the pyramid,” Tope signs off.