The Electric-Vehicle financing and vehicle lifecycle management platform Vidyut (VT) announced on December 8 that it has received $4 million in equity and debt from a group of clean energy strategic angels led by Force Ventures and Veda VC.
Sujeet Kumar, who started Udaan, Sahil Barua, who started and is CEO of Delhivery, Kunal Shah, who started CRED, Sriharsha Majety, who started Swiggy, and Rajat Verma, who started Lohum, all took part in the seed round.
The startup will use the money to grow into more cities and hire twice as many people on its credit, engineering, and sales teams in the next year.
We plan to expand the service’s availability both geographically and in terms of the OEMs with which it is partnered. We’ll also hire twice as many people,” said cofounder Xitij Kothi to Moneycontrol.
Most of Vidyut’s business was in Bengaluru and Delhi, but Kothi said that the company was looking at cities like Chennai, Hyderabad, and Pune now that it had more money.
Vidyut was started by Kothi and Gaurav Srivastava in 2021. Through its ownership plans, the company wants to make commercial Electric-Vehicle ownership affordable and risk-free for its customers.
VT has two ways to own an electric vehicle: a hybrid financing model that combines a vehicle loan with a battery subscription and lowers the upfront cost of an EV by 40–50%, and a traditional term loan plan.
VT gets a high residual value for EVs by using data on the health of the batteries and its underwriting model. This helps customers get an effective interest rate of 7%. This is almost the same as what PSU banks offer for traditional cars with an internal combustion engine as a return on investment (ICE).
When compared to a vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine, the operation of an electric car is vastly different, making it challenging for conventional bankers to underwrite. This is why the number of EVs that are financed is so low,” Kothi said. We want to make it simpler for all businesses to qualify for financing, given 80% of current owners of commercial electric vehicles are themselves, small business owners.
Even though the company is not in the passenger vehicle business, it plans to offer financing for retail passenger vehicles in the long run.
Small fleet owners and consumers in India have the key to rapid expansion because they are the ones who will ultimately drive adoption. Sujeet Kumar, the founder of Udaan and an angel investor, said that Vidyut’s solution is one of the few that takes into account the details of the Electric-Vehicle ecosystem and uses technology to solve one of the biggest problems in the field.
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