This article has been published in partnership with Kalaari Capital.

In 2020, Akash Gupta, Abhinav Roy and Ankit Joshi were in a dusty workshop in Bhopal trying to build an electric last-mile delivery truck.

But the more they worked on the truck, the more one problem began to overshadow the rest.

A commercial vehicle earns when it is moving. A diesel truck could refuel in minutes, while an electric one might spend an hour or more plugged in. Then there was range, battery life and safety. Each of those questions seemed to lead back to the same component.

“If refuelling happens in 10 to 15 minutes, why does it need one or two hours to charge a truck?” Akash remembers wondering.

At the time, the three were doing much of the work themselves. “It was three of us,” he recalls. “Ankit used to do all the wiring, Abhinav used to write all the code, and I was doing some welding of our initial prototypes.”

When seven more people joined them, they moved into a basement and painted the floor so the team would have a cleaner place to work.

By then, the insight that would change what they were building had become difficult to ignore. To make the truck they wanted practical, they first needed a battery that could charge quickly, last for years and remain safe without making the vehicle too expensive.

So they stopped trying to build the whole truck and focused on what they believed was the harder problem inside it.

It started with racing cars built in college

The decision to build together in 2020 had been years in the making.

Akash and Abhinav met at IIT-BHU in 2013, where Akash led the automobile club and Abhinav led aeromodelling. Their hours outside class went into racing cars, drones and RC planes.

“We used to build a lot of racing cars in college, and that is where we got our hands dirty,” Akash says. “That is how we got interested in product building, and we got addicted to it in some way.”

Ankit, another automobile enthusiast who had worked on electric powertrain technology, later joined them.

The three had already thought about building a company while in college. But they also knew that starting a hardware business would need more than enthusiasm. So after graduating, they spent a few years learning elsewhere.

Akash joined the JSW Group and worked on an electric car project, gaining experience on the business side of EVs. Abhinav worked in robotics and automotive technology. Ankit pursued further studies before deciding that building products interested him more than continuing towards a PhD.

By 2020, their paths opened up again. Akash’s EV project at JSW had been put on hold, while the pandemic interrupted some of the R&D work Abhinav was involved in. The three decided to return to the idea they had been carrying since college, this time full-time.

Those years of experience had also made one gap clearer.

“You can buy a good motor, you can buy a good instrument cluster,” Akash explains. “But you could not buy a battery pack. So that was the realisation in 2020. We thought, rather than building a full truck, let’s just focus on the battery.”

The problem was not finding battery cells. It was putting them together into a pack that could give a driver good range, charge quickly, stay safe and continue performing for years.

Charging time became their first target. They began with a goal of around 30 minutes and hoped eventually to reach 15. After months of experiments, they achieved that number in the........

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