Twenty Two Motors claims the lithium ion battery pack has been developed taking into consideration the Indian temperature profile and thus optimises performance and battery life
Twenty Two Motors Co-founders Co-founders Parveen Kharb (CEO) and Vijay Chandrawat (COO)
Gurgaon-based electric scooter startup, Twenty Two Motors, has raised US$1.6 million in pre-series A round funding led by Ishwar Singh, CEO of Haryana Industries, an automobile component manufacturer. Farhaan Shabbir, former Director of Harley-Davidson, also joined the round.
“The investment will be used to build and prove the product apart from strengthening the startup’s human resource capabilities. Broadly the investment will be channeled for prototype vehicle development, testing, strengthening team, component development and factory setup,” said Co-founder Vijay Chandrawat.
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Twenty Two Motors was incorporated in August 2016 by Parveen Kharb (CEO) and Chandrawat (COO) with the aim of making cutting-edge electric vehicles (EV) technology affordable for the current generation.
“Tremendous work has been done in the prototyping and developing of the highly-effective EV since our launch. We have been able to attract the seasoned and quality talent from major auto companies. Major hurdles of developing lithium-ion battery, battery management system (BMS) and smart electronics has also been resolved,” said Kharb.
According to the company, the lithium ion battery pack and BMS has been developed taking into consideration the Indian temperature profile and thus optimises performance and battery life. The smart scooter will be fully Internet of Things (IoT)-compliant and will have devices like GPS, GPRS, gyroscope, and accelerometer — making it virtually theft proof.
The data from these IoT devices is being decoded by servers by using Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence techniques to precisely determine to ride behaviour of the user. The user is always connected to scooter via its mobile app which can also be used to control the access remotely. The scooter information is available on the cloud and hence all the troubleshooting and other service can be managed automatically.
“We have strategically invested in Twenty Two Motors as we could find synergies between both the businesses. Industrial house will gain insights in EV domain while Twenty Two Motors will have increased capabilities to shorten their product development cycle,” said Singh of Haryana Group of Industries.
It is clear that India is slowly waking to the EV era, given the recent spurt of startups in this space. Bangalore-based Ather Energy, which raised a whopping US$27 million from Hero Motocop in October 2016, is a leader in the electric scooter vertical. Its first vehicle will also hit the market early next year. Emflux Motors is another electric two-wheeler startup, which is mainly catering to consumers who love high-performance bikes.
Image Credit: Twenty Two Motors
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