Meet the EV entrepreneur who bagged seed capital from Matrix Partners

Mohit Sharma started Oye! Rickshaw in 2017, when the market for electric three-wheelers had just begun to take off

The electric three-wheeler, also known as e-rickshaw, was never a start-up category. But that changed when Matrix Partners, a marquee venture capital firm, invested in a small proof-of-concept stage firm, back in 2017. 

Oye! Rickshaw, at the time, only had a mechanical engineer and his friend trying to bring the convenience of app-based booking to this new mobility category. Matrix, through Ola and later Ola Electric, was supporting the development of a similar service on the Ola platform. There were synergies and Matrix came on-board as the first investor in the Delhi-based start-up.

If bagging Matrix as the first investor was not enough, the three-year-old firm recently raised $10 million in series A from Chiratae Ventures, Xiaomi and the family trust of Pawan Munjal, a promotor of Hero Group.

Founder Mohit Sharma, a mechanical engineering graduate from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, got some help from his family in the starting the venture. The 30-year-old and his uncle, in 2014, started an e-rickshaw manufacturing company, Jangid Motors, which later grew to become the largest battery-rickshaw OEM in the country, he claimed.

Sharma grew up in a family that has been into the auto-ancillary business for two decades. His father and uncle’s firm supplied components to Minda Corp, a large vendor for Maruti, and Motherson Sumi, among others. Since school and later college, Sharma has had a fascination for robotics and heavy machinery, which he pursued by taking up a job at Hero MotoCorp, then Hero Honda, after graduation.

He quit the job after two year to set-up Jangid Motors. And in 2017, he went on to launch Oye! Rickshaw as a new independent venture. In  fact, 2016-17 was the time when e-rickshaws were booming. At the time, two years after formally regulating e-rickshaws, the government removed the need to avail a permit, which led to a boom in sales.

Today, about 300,000 e-rickshaws are sold every year, and last year sales of such vehicles surpassed those of gasoline-powered three-wheelers, said Sharma. In fact, electric three-wheelers sales are over 50 percent of all electric vehicles sold in the country.

Oye! Rickshaw’s aim is to take e-three wheeler mobility to the next level. It’s an app-based service for booking e-rickshaws in district clusters. Typically used for travelling to the nearest metro station or the local market, the rickshaws ferry passengers over shared rides over a maximum distance of five kilometers. Sharma said that pre-Covid, his firm would enable 30,000 rides a day.

In many ways, the tech platform build by Oye! Rickshaw is different from the back-end of Ola or Uber. For one, the route a user travels over on the e-rickshaw is typically the same each day--for instance, heading to the same station metro at a fixed time. This allows the algorithm to learn user preferences over time and through this Oye! Rickshaw enables what it calls ‘one-tap booking’, without having to enter pick-up and drop off every-time.

For ETA or estimated drop time, the firm uses a proprietary algorithm. The rides are shared, with pick-ups on the way, and the drop-time time-stamp takes that into account. What is unique is that the algorithm ensures that the drop time (of the shared ride) is never over 5 minutes compared to the time taken if the passenger takes a solo ride. The system does not take a pick-up if this “delta” exceeds over five minutes.

Sharma added that the service required creation of what is called ‘virtual stands’. These are locations where pick-ups and drop-offs happen. The stands are created by mapping location of customers – the demands points – and frequent drop points, and entirely through technology.

According to Sharma, e-rickshaws have the largest adoption among all types of EVs and this is set to go up as congestion increases in cities. For now, e-rickshaws dominates northern cities like NCR, Lucknow, Kanpur and peripheral districts in south like Mysuru and Thane. They are not allowed in Mumbai or Bengaluru. 

Further adoption will happen when charging infrastructure improves, said Sharma. He said battery-swapping is a more viable solution than charging stations. Players like Sun Mobility and Ola Electric are in early-stages of deploying batter-swapping stations in some places. For Oye! Rickshaw, which has 2,000-3,000 driver partners on its network, the next step is to partner with these providers.

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