Startup Series: BOLT
Today's guest is Mohit Yadav, co-founder of BOLT.
BOLT was founded in 2017 with the dream of making electric vehicles more accessible by easing and accelerating the transition of emerging markets to cleaner mobility. Currently, the company manages India’s largest EV charging network with over 10,000 charging points across 100 different cities.
Although we haven't spent much time on the region here on the My Climate Journey podcast, this episode is particularly important given India's population and emerging economy. How the country’s economy evolves in the years to come will be critical to global emissions reduction as its population is unfortunately feeling the effects of climate change today in a major way.
We have a great discussion about the state of the EV market in India, BOLT's business model, their future expansion plans, and how the company started in software and evolved to include a hardware component.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on Twitter @codysimms (me), @mcjpod (podcast) or @mcjcollective (company). You can reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded June 29, 2022.
In today's episode, we cover:
An overview of BOLT
The company's focus on emerging markets and peer-to-peer network approach
Mohit's background in software tech and journey into climate
How BOLT sought to improve the two-wheeler experience and early challenges the company faced
BOLT's beginning as a software solution for making "smart" two and three-wheeler EVs and how they evolved to include a hardware component
Cost challenges of building a charging infrastructure in India
Comparisons between EVs and smartphones
An overview of India's renewable energy sources
Passive income incentives for BOLT customers
BOLT's partnerships with retail chains, governments, etc.
Future uses for BOLT's anonymous OS data
BOLT's expansion from a global perspective, including trials in Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, etc.
Running costs of EVs vs. ICE vehicles
BOLT's funding to date
The company's open engineering roles
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Jason Jacobs:
Hey, everyone. Jason here. I am the My Climate Journey show host. Before we get going, I wanted to take a minute and tell you about the My Climate Journey or MCJ, as we call it, membership option. Membership came to be because there were a bunch of people that were listening to the show that weren't just looking for education, but they were longing for a peer group as well. So we set up a Slack community for those people that's now mushroomed into more than 1,300 members. There is an application to become a member. It's not an exclusive thing. There's four criteria we screen for, determination to tackle the problem of climate change, ambition to work on the most impactful solution areas, optimism that we can make a dent and we're not wasting our time for trying, and a collaborative spirit. Beyond that, the more diversity, the better.
Jason Jacobs:
There's a bunch of great things that have come out of that community, a number of founding teams that have met in there, a number of nonprofits that have been established, a bunch of hiring that's been done, a bunch of companies that have raised capital in there, a bunch of funds that have gotten limited partners or investors for their funds in there, as well as a bunch of events and programming by members and for members and some open source projects that are getting actively worked on that hatched in there as well. At any rate, if you want to learn more, you can go to myclimatejourney.co, the website, and click the Become A Member tab at the top. Enjoy the show.
Jason Jacobs:
Hello, everyone. This is Jason Jacobs and welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I can help.
Cody Simms:
Today's guest is Mohit Yadav, co-founder at BOLT, India's largest electric vehicle charger network. Also, you might notice that I'm not Jason. This is Cody Simms, Jason's partner at MCJ. I did today's interview with Mohit at BOLT, and you'll hear me take on episodes here and there going forward. I was excited for today's episode because we haven't spent much time on India here on the My Climate Journey podcast and given India's population and emerging economy, how the Indian economy evolves in the years to come will be critical to global emissions reduction. Of course, India is already unfortunately feeling the effects of climate change today in a major way.
Cody Simms:
With transportation being a major global emissions factor, BOLT is on the front lines of helping scale EV adoption across India today. We have a great discussion about the state of the EV market in India, BOLT's business model, their future expansion plans and how BOLT came to be. I was surprised to learn that they started with a pure software solution as an operating system for electric vehicles and the charging strategy evolved out of that. I learned a ton and I hope you do too. Mohit, welcome to the show.
Mohit Yadav:
Thank you, Cody. Nice to be here.
Cody Simms:
Well, I'm so excited to have you on here because obviously, EVs are a massively growing market all around the world and obviously India itself is a massively growing market within that space, and you're right at the intersection. We haven't done a lot on South Asia or India as it pertains to the My Climate Journey podcast. So, I know I have a lot to learn and I'm sure our listeners are excited to learn from you as well.
Mohit Yadav:
Yeah. Fantastic. Always excited to share what we are doing here for emerging markets and how we are trying to solve the for climate. Yeah. Excited to be here and what our journey has been like. Yeah. I look forward to the podcast.
Cody Simms:
Well, why don't you start with just an overview of what is BOLT?
Mohit Yadav:
Yeah. At BOLT, what we are essentially doing is we are building technologies and infrastructure that accelerate EV adoption all over. We have a specific market that we are really targeting. It's the emerging markets, where you have these millions and millions of two-wheelers that are running around. If you look at it, majority of the solutions that have come for EVs are in general have been just a derived version of what has been really done for cars for Western markets. So, what we really feel is that the solutions that would enable or accelerate this EV adoption in emerging markets, how to be built here. So when I say that BOLT is building technology and infrastructure that accelerate EV adoption, what I really mean is that we build technology that can make any vehicle smart. So it's like an Android for EVs. EVs are just like computers on wheels and people will want software-based features. We've seen this with Tesla and cars, so people want a taste of that in two-wheelers as well.
Mohit Yadav:
When I talk about infrastructure, we are building the... In fact, we already have the largest peer-to-peer charging network in India with, I think, more than 10,000 charging points in hundred-plus cities. We are growing rapidly. It's a peer-to-peer network. It's a different approach from what anywhere everyone else is taking, where people just deploy charging points at their own cost and do the service and maintenance. We believe more in a peer-to-peer approach, where people would be setting these charging points up by themselves and they would be able to share them with others when they are not using, so kind of an Airbnb model here. So we are sitting on both sides if you look at from the energy perspective, on the dispensation side, the supply and the demand side of energy, so really in a good position. It's like a chicken and egg problem. While EVs need charging points, more charging points, more EVs, so it's like virtuous cycle. We have turned that chicken and egg problem more into a virtuous cycle, I would say.
Cody Simms:
Wow. Well, so much to unpack. I certainly think of you all as really building out a large EV charging platform across India to start and I assume global aspirations beyond that. Don't know anything about the plans you have on the helping vehicles become smart themselves, and so we have a lot to discuss to lean into all of that. Why don't we start with your background? So if I understand, you're based in Bangalore, I believe. You have a strong tech background with stints at Oracle and Adobe. Walk me through how you went from working on software tech to building out a large EV platform or the largest, I think, EV platform in India and also how you met your co-founder Jyoti and his background as well.
Mohit Yadav:
Absolutely. Let me tell you a little bit about ourselves because we go way back. Me and Jyoti are batchmates from college, in fact, the same hostel, same dorm so the comradery is really strong. We've known each other for about 15 years now. We were in that point in our lives that you are out of college. When you're just out of college in India, everyone gets a bike. Just like everyone gets a car in America, you get a two-wheeler in India. Me and Jyoti used to go for all these bike rides all the time and we saw that it was very difficult to ride the bike and there were no assistive features or nothing to help us when we were riding these bikes. You couldn't see the map. You can't take calls. You're just riding the bike, right? That's the only thing we're doing. But when we looked at cars, they had really evolved. You had navigation systems, all things fancy.
Mohit Yadav:
So we really started off as improving the experience with the person who's riding a two-wheeler. The two-wheelers hadn't really evolved. This journey, I think, started in 2016. Starting, we registered our company in 2017, but that's how we started. We thought we will make something cool, which makes our lives solve for us first and then we'll solve for others. So, that's how the idea started. We first started with making an augmented reality helmet, which you could wear. You could see the map floating, all the augmented reality stuff, because as a genius, you like to build something very cool, right? So we built that. When we tried selling it, it was just too expensive. We quickly realized for any technology to be really successful in the emerging markets, it has to be price-competitive and it has to solve for a plethora of different permutation and combinations of hardware if we really look at it.
Mohit Yadav:
So that's when we really realized that we should be building a operating stack that can make any bike smart. So we built that first. All right. And then we went out and started selling and we realized that no one really cares about all these smart features in a country like India, because everyone is just obsessed with mileage, right? They just want to see how much you get per gallon or something like that. So we thought, "Okay. How do we go from there?" We didn't have any pedigree. It was just two software guys entering into the OEM world. We just started a year ago. We went to all the big OEMs and they're like, "You started one year ago. What if you shut down? My vehicle is going to be there for 10 years. Where do we go from there?" Right? So, the big guys didn't literally listen to us. So, we approached the small guys who were selling a couple of thousand vehicles in India and we gave this offering to them. Those guys were actually selling EVs. They were selling electric vehicles.
Cody Simms:
Mostly two-wheelers and three-wheelers EVs? Yeah.
Mohit Yadav:
This entire context is all about two-wheelers and three-wheelers. Yeah. So that's the premise here. They were selling two-wheelers in India. What we were essentially doing was just getting these vehicles from China and assembling it in India and just selling them. So we took a trip to China, took a lot of trips out to China after that, because that's used to be the holy grail of supply chain around '17. We went there and saw that about, there were... In India, if you look at it. In the ICE world, I think there was some maybe 10 OEMs making vehicles, right? We went to China, 97% of two-wheelers were already electric. They had started on this journey about 15 years ago.
Mohit Yadav:
Another interesting thing, there were 3,000 manufacturers of OEM. We realized how ridiculously simple two-wheelers and three-wheelers were to make and the real differentiation will come via software and personalization. Our software got a lot of traction in China. In fact, we first built our stacks specifically for selling inside China because the condition was different back then. Now, obviously, India and China are in different situations geopolitically. So we went there and people were really accepting because they had seen the normal EVs running for 10, 15 years. There was a huge number of OEMs who were making these EVs, but no one really had the software capability to make them smart, right? So people were looking for the next-
Cody Simms:
When you say make them smart, what does that mean?
Mohit Yadav:
So it just behaves like Tesla. You can turn it off using your phone. If you come near the EV, it'll turn itself on. Different riders have a different riding profile. If you give it to your kids, you can reduce the maximum speed of the vehicle. Basically, it would just get personalized the way you really like. So, all the peripherals and-
Cody Simms:
So it wasn't yet about mileage or range or anything yet. It was just purely about helping you control the vehicle and have remote sensing on what's going on with the bike.
Mohit Yadav:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Because when it comes to EV, the question of mileage is already kaput, right? The cost savings are anyway huge. So that's not the primary question everyone asks in a cost-sensitive economy, if you look at it. So the question of mileage is gone. What is the next big thing you're looking at? So we saw people move from phones to smartphones, TVs to smart TVs. It was, I think, very obvious, it's going to be a general progression that people move from... Normally, we used the smart TVs. We got very good traction in China, integrated WeChat, Baidu, everything when we started. Yeah. It took us about two to three years to make an operating system that could run across any electric vehicle.
Mohit Yadav:
So if you look at the people who are building electric vehicles right now in India, like Ather's and Ola's of the world, they are more on the lines of an iOS or Blackberry's or Samsung's when the smartphone revolution started, right? They have a completely vertically indicated stack. But now that we reflect back on the smartphone revolution that happened in 2008, how many of those companies are really surviving, have really made it big in the software game? It's really iOS and Android, right? Why Android is really successful in economy and emerging economies is that you get a basic feature set, even at a 10,000 rupee price point and even a Samsung Note kind of an experience. So the platform provides almost 80 to 90% of the functionality on a plethora, on a wide range of products. So that's what we really thought that we had to build a solution that runs from $1,000 bike to maybe a $10,000 bike as well.
Cody Simms:
Awesome. Okay. So you started out with crazy experiments around heads up display on helmets and decided, "Oh, let's do something more practical." So you ended up building this OS that helps EV OEMs offer smart features to their customers. Was the end consumer app that they were offering a BOLT app or were they branding it as their own app on a per OEM basis?
Mohit Yadav:
So, it was exactly like Android. So they had their own app, which was co-branded. We used to be called REVOS before this. The name was very complicated so we just moved to BOLT when we started deploying the charging network. So it was just like the app would open up. It would say powered by REVOS. And then you have their own custom app. Also, the speedometer, basically the instrument cluster that you see where you speed and everything, that was digitized and that had the actual OS running inside. So, we started off with just one variant of the OS. Now, we have multiple OSs that we support, from a basic dot matrix OS to a full-blown Android version of it.
Cody Simms:
Are drivers then mounting these on their handlebars and using this as they drive, or what's the use case from a driver perspective?
Mohit Yadav:
Yeah. So they don't mount anything on the handlebar. Our solution gets integrated when the vehicle is manufactured. So that's why it took us a lot of time to even get into a supply chain, right? Because you have to prove the product, you have to test it for 10,000 miles or something like that on road to test the stability and everything. So when the vehicles roll of the assembly line, our OS is already a part of the vehicle, just like once you get a handset, which has Android, it already has it once it's assembled.
Cody Simms:
Got it. And so, then, the drivers can engage with this in an app on their smartphone, but they're not doing it while they drive. They're using it to control the bike in terms of setting up features, and you said speed meters and things like that separately from while they're actually behind the handlebars.
Mohit Yadav:
Yeah. So the idea was it should allow for two things. It should allow for riders to not take out their phones while they're riding the bikes, because that's very dangerous, right? So you see all the call notifications, navigation guidance. If there is any error in your bike, it'll tell you, "Hey, this is wrong. You have some temperature errors, throttle error." It'll keep running diagnostics in the background, nonetheless, right? Once they're off the bike, they can do some smart things. If you want follow me home headlamps, you want to set up the sensitivity of the theft lock, you set up, you want to change the acceleration or the talk of the vehicle, everything is at your disposal. We started off with a very wide feature set, but now we have restricted the feature set that we give to make it more consumer-friendly and simple basically. But yeah, the possibilities are endless. Yeah.
Cody Simms:
Yeah. Intriguing go-to-market. And so, then, you have this install base across OEMs. At some point, you say, "Hey, let's build a charger network." Because that's what I think of BOLT as is like the largest EV charger network in India, so it's fascinating that you started with a software play. So, tell me how you've expanded on with the hardware and charger side.
Mohit Yadav:
Absolutely. When we started, we were very clear on the vision that we only want to build software, but no one really built the hardware for us because we're too young, right? We didn't have any purchasing power, any volume. So we built our own hardware, took us about two to three years to build it, to prove it. So I'll give you an example of Amazon. When they launched Alexa, they launched where their own speaker, right? You have to show the market that it works with your own hardware. So that's the approach we took. I think when we started in, I think, January 2017, our first launch happened in India in 2019, December 2019, maybe the perfect timing. After that, COVID struck and everyone is just sitting at home. All our efforts of two, three years, all the incredible IB we had really built, we couldn't deploy the bikes, right? It was a very tough time.
Mohit Yadav:
So in the meantime, what we really focused on was building extra modules on top of the OS. If you have a smart bike, you can always put it on a fleet. You can always share it with others. You can always have better insurance. You can always have financing tied up into it. So we built all these modules. Obviously, we saw that EVs aren't going to really solve for themselves if there is no charging infra. But we looked at a lot of players, like we looked at America and developed countries, where EV adoption was really picking up and Tesla really making the waves back then and I think even bigger waves right now, but I think the momentum had shifted if you look at from a consumer mindset that EVs are real practical, right?
Mohit Yadav:
So to build the charging network, we saw that it requires a lot of investment. All the charging infrastructure, all the solution, when it comes to charging that were present in India, they were very expensive. I think the nearest, we tried searching for a basic charging point, which could just charge a two-wheeler, right? And it was costing about $1,000. That's the cost of the bike. Who's going to put a charging infra that cost as much as a bike, or sometimes it cost even more? The very interesting thing about two-wheelers is that for every car sold in India, 10 two-wheelers are sold, right? In a country like India, all the fuel our country uses, 70% of it is consumed by two-wheelers, right? So they make up for the lion share of the energy that is consumed by their transport division.
Cody Simms:
Are they mostly diesel or regular gasoline?
Mohit Yadav:
Gasoline. Yeah.
Cody Simms:
Petrol. Okay.
Mohit Yadav:
In gasoline. Yeah. The energy requirements really for a two-wheeler is maybe one-50th or one-100th of your car, right? It takes lesser power than your air conditioner of diesel. We just couldn't understand why people are selling charging solutions, which cost so much and are built for cars.
Cody Simms:
That stat is an EV stat or an ICE two-wheeler stat?
Mohit Yadav:
That's an EV stat, like the-
Cody Simms:
An EV stat. Yeah.
Mohit Yadav:
Yeah.
Cody Simms:
Because even ICE two-wheelers obviously use a significantly less petrol than a four-wheeler car, just given the weight.
Mohit Yadav:
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. But in general, there are two things. First of all, they are way more efficient even when it comes to ICE vehicles, but with EVs, the results are even compounded because it's a better technology, just more efficient that way, if you look at it. Yeah. So now coming back to the point, we saw that if it takes lesser power than your AC and your heater and you can power your air conditioner or your heater using your household power supply, why do you need this special infrastructure? It should be way more affordable. So IOT-based sockets were, I think, have been in the market for about 15, 20 years. I think we launched in October 2020. So we thought anyone who is buying an EV today is any way putting a basic 15-amp socket that you have in our house. That's where they're charging their EVs, right?
Mohit Yadav:
The only thing that you really need is to enable those people to share that charging point with others when they're not using it, right? So that's how BOLT came into play. It was also an additional source of revenue for us because we could sell hardware and survive in the difficult times of COVID. We saw that there is no special infrastructure required. You just need us MCB, like a circuit breaker on top of a socket, and they're good to go with some basic IOT. 95% of the times, the charging point you have in your home, you're not using it anyway. Let's say you even share even 10% of the 95% of the time it's unused, you solve it for others as well. So making a technology that enables people to become a part of the solution, rather than saying, "There are no charging points. There are not shared charging infrastructure and it's expensive to set up charging infrastructure," so we had this approach of having a peer-to-peer network.
Cody Simms:
Talk about the speed of charging on a 15-amp just behind the meter aftermarket device relative to $1,000 charge point.
Mohit Yadav:
It's the same. That's the reason why we were so confused. Why is it so expensive? Because there is enough juice that comes out of 15-amp socket that can charge any two-wheeler in maybe one hour or less than one hour. The constraints are really on the adapters that comes with the EV charger and the battery chemistry and the circuitry inside the EV. So if you compare it with smartphones, we always compare EVs with smartphones, the generation one of smartphones came with swappable batteries and had very bad charging times and they drained very fast. But look at us now, it takes hardly 30 minutes to juice up an entire Android phones and all convert takes battery. So it's only a matter of time when the battery chemistry and all these things evolve and we should be able to charge with these softwares. Currently, it takes about three to four hours to completely top-up an EV based on battery capacity, but the constraint is really on the circuitry of the EV.
Cody Simms:
Once fully charged, a typical EV, if you're a delivery driver and you're driving it all day, can you do a full day on one charge or are you needing to charge multiple times over the course of a day?
Mohit Yadav:
Depends on the driver. I think typically, we would give you about 80 to 100 kilometers of range, a typical EV, so maybe it's not enough for a delivery driver, but only the top delivery drivers who really drive around 200 kilometers. In fact, if you see right now in a city like Bangalore, all the delivery drivers have switched to EVs because it has immense cost savings, but however, the solution that they're really using right now are battery swapping things. So as in when vehicle range increases and it goes about more than 200 kilometers, I don't think there is going to be any need for swapping if you really look at it.
Cody Simms:
Let's hit this a little bit from a climate perspective. I'm sure some listeners are saying, "Ah, the grid in India is so dirty. They're not net zero till 2070." Are we just stealing from one point of dirty emissions in ICE vehicles to now having electric two-wheelers that are running on coal power? Help me understand. I mean, I know I have a perspective here, but I'm curious how you all have thought about that as well.
Mohit Yadav:
Yeah. So I think there is a misconception also a little bit that India uses a lot of coal to produce this electricity. In fact, I would say the amount of electricity that is generated from renewable sources in India is close to 40%, because there are two things. Our country has really invested in hydro projects, dams. We have a lot of rivers, a lot of water flowing through the country. It's a peninsula, so really best that way geographically. Also, it's a tropical country, sunshines all the time, right? So in fact, if you look at, India is very bullish on the EV in terms of green energy. We have airports in Kerala that are entirely powered by solar. We are taking big leaps as a country when it comes to renewable. It's just an optics perspective that we are burning a coal, they're burning too much coal. We do burn coal, but we have a very significant chunk of electricity that is coming from renewables.
Cody Simms:
Fantastic. So let me make sure we can really press on the business model of BOLT's. You have consumers who are buying, who have the OS built into their OEM of the bike that they own and use the OS themselves. They can purchase, I believe, their own charge point for their own house and just charge themselves. They can share it with neighbors. So if I'm a consumer owner who has a charge point, can I also make money loaning out my charge point to other people? And then how does that compare to an actual charge point operator, like a business that may have BOLT installed?
Mohit Yadav:
Absolutely. I think that was one of the key considerations when we launched this thing. So, I think when telecom revolution really took place in India, you had a lot of these mom-and-pop stores who had a small PCO box. You could just put a coin and it gave them passive income, right? Those mom-and-pop stores did all the hard work by themselves. They caught the line set up and everything. So as a user, when you buy a BOLT charging point, you can obviously charge your own vehicle. You can set when the charger would be private, when it would be public, or it would be restricted amongst your friends, basically groups essentially. It's totally up to you what price you really want to set. We don't have any control over the pricing. We feel with so much ambiguity going ahead, if a charger is shipped with every bike, I think game theory will solve the pricing issue by themselves.
Cody Simms:
And so, do you help me understand what my current local cost of electricity is so that I can at least have a baseline of how much I should be charging to charge so that I'm not going underwater with renting out my charge point?
Mohit Yadav:
Absolutely. Absolutely. So it's the same app. It's called the BOLT - EV Charging Network app. It's the same app for the consumer or for the user and the host, both. So the host has a section called my chargers, where you get to see how many booking have happened on your charger in a particular amount of time and how much you have spent, how much cost you've incurred in order to dispense that electricity so that you can set your rates accordingly.
Cody Simms:
I don't know a lot about how the electrical utilities work in India. Do you have to have partnerships with utilities to understand the cost of electricity at any given moment?
Mohit Yadav:
No, it's simple. When they're setting up a charger, we ask the user, "Hey, how much do you pay per kilowatt per unit of electricity?" Based on that, their own calculations, their input, we give the calculation back to them.
Cody Simms:
Okay. And then the reason to have the ability to program when the charge point is available for others to use is just so you don't come home from work and have some random person sitting in your charge point charging up.
Mohit Yadav:
Yeah. So a charging point, which is public all the time, would lead to a lot of nuisances near your house also. So if it doesn't show up on the map at a particular time, it solves for you, right?
Cody Simms:
Oh, got it. So you have a map that shows all the real-time active charge points that I could use as a consumer.
Mohit Yadav:
Yes. You also get to see things that... Since we are deploying at such a immense space, like the nearest competition is maybe one-10th of what we are doing, right? So there will be a lot of charging points, which are not functional. It happens with even the expensive ones that are being set up, right? There is a information right on the app, whenever you select a charging point, "Hey, when was this charging point used lastly?" So that you have some confidence. There is an option to call the host right there before you go and navigate there to check, "Hey, I'm going to be coming here. Is the charging point working or not, et cetera, et cetera? Is electricity there?" So all the concerns can be addressed before you take that decision of going to a charging point.
Cody Simms:
Do you have to maintain a fairly large maintenance profile on these charge points in the event that there's an issue with one or it stops working or is that just essentially a consumer warranty that they deal with at that point to return the hardware?
Mohit Yadav:
Yeah. So it comes with the standard, the one year warranty that you have with any gadget or sockets, if you look at it. Yeah, it's a standard socket. That's it.
Cody Simms:
Okay. What about regulations? Are there any regulatory hurdles that you have to overcome to just go with a direct-to-consumer model like this?
Mohit Yadav:
No, not really. Indian government has re-regulated putting charging points as long as you have a commercial connection. So all the mom-and-pop stores, residential apartments, condos, there's a concept of residential apartments, which is very popular in India. So it's like a semi-private or public space if you look at it. So they have their own electricity. So they have the liberty to put their charging points. All the mom-and-pop stores have the option to put these charging points. When it comes to me as an individual user giving it to you as my friend or someone who's visiting my house, I can just add them to a restricted network. So it only shows up for my friends, not for everyone else.
Cody Simms:
And then I've seen you all have announced partnerships with retail chains, with governments, et cetera. I assume those business models work a little bit differently, where you're working with them on some kind of aggregate pricing model, or is it all still just on a per charge point basis?
Mohit Yadav:
So, how it really works is we honestly feel charging points should become commodity. That's why we launched BOLT. There is no rocket science in making a socket that works with IOT. That has been solved maybe two decades ago, right? But because no one was really making it for us, we were, "Hey, we'll make it ourselves and give it." So our idea, when it comes to any government deployment or anything like that, obviously you make some money on the charging point or whatever it is, but we have multiple models. So either the customer can choose for the CMS, the app, the SaaS part of it, they can pay us for the SaaS part of it, but they're always free to choose the pricing that they like.
Mohit Yadav:
We don't want to control the pricing because we believe if you are the one providing the service, you should be in charge of pricing. So we do have plans coming here in the future where we'll suggest, "Hey, this is the pricing you should put so that more people come to a charging point," just aid and increase the business what these people get. But right now, it's just like you can choose whatever you really like.
Cody Simms:
I assume you're an operating system, so you're sitting on just hoards of data, both around individual bike performance, around performance from one OEM to another, comparative performance around range performance. Is there a data business for you as well in all of this? How do you manage privacy and whatnot if there is?
Mohit Yadav:
Absolutely. I think that's a great question, Cody. So I think data is going to be crucial in the long run, because you can do things like you can generate maps with the data that you get. You can give the option to the user, "Hey, if you really want to participate, if you share your anonymous data, you'll get some monetary incentive just for riding your bike." Right? So we plan to put that option to users working with OEMs. When it comes to handling OEM's data, we have two models. If you really have the budget, we can go for a separate corporate deployment, where you own the servers and everything. But for smaller OEMs, they do not want to pay that cost. All of the EV OEMs, they are big players who might want to corporate deployment, but enterprise deployment, if you really look at it, but the option that we really provide them is that your data is going to be residing with us. If you want it to be forwarded to your servers, we'll do that so that you have a copy of it.
Mohit Yadav:
The offering that we really give them is that we will give you anonymized reports of the entire industry if you choose to participate in this program, if you choose to share your data. So it's up to one OEM to other. So, any way we give insights on our dashboard, "Hey, your bike is doing well in this region. Maybe not well in this region because there is too much temperature. There's too much salt. It's a bit near beach. There's too much salt and that salt is really detrimental to EV's performance." Anyway, those analysts is on a per OEM basis, but we leave that option open to them. If you choose to participate in this collective, this common corpus of data, you will get some extra information that these components are doing really well in this geography. These components aren't doing well. This battery is good. This controller does well until this load.
Mohit Yadav:
So all really, really, really minute data, which really lets you tune your supply chain and make a better product, all that data is very, very valuable to OEM. And then there is obviously the financing part of it. Here's a normal vehicle. You get it at X percent interest. Here's a BOLT OS-enabled vehicle. You get an X minus 0.5, 0.2, I don't know, X minus 5%, something like that, right? Because the more secure asset, you can control the speed. You can lock. You can do pretty much anything that you really like. So then there's that. The longer and what we really want to do is collect all this data and build good financial models so that insurance and financing can become much more affordable for EVs, because right now, the demand for EVs in India is huge. If you want to buy a two-wheeler or a four-wheeler, you have a wait, I think, five to six months, at least, right?
Mohit Yadav:
Why people are not able to buy? First of all, obviously, the supply chain, and second is they know they want an EV, but they simply do not have the purchasing power, right? So how do you do that? For that, you have to give confidence to the financiers that, "Hey, I'll let you monitor and track and control this asset in case the payments don't go through. I'll also build this data pipeline in the long run, where you can look at what components degrade, how over time, how the back repair degrades, how the value of the vehicle deteriorates," so that they can build those financial models and come up with a very nice insurance, which is way more customer-friendly.
Cody Simms:
It's interesting. Based on all that, especially local data or even component level data that you have, I'm guessing the total cost of ownership of an EV plus BOLT relative to, say, comparative to an ICE vehicle is actually even for the same OEM may differ by geography just based on things like you said, like weather or other environmental factors. You're actually able to help presumably these OEMs help their potential customers understand what the TCO, the total cost of ownership might be in their local geo to help them make the buy decision.
Mohit Yadav:
Absolutely. Absolutely. So that's the intention behind. Like I mentioned, when I was given my introduction, Cody, that BOLT is in the business of making technologies and infrastructure that accelerate EV adoption. So for that, you need data. You need to enable the charging infrastructure at a faction of a cost. You need to enable the OEMs to build better product. Because if you look at it in the long run, Cody, the service industry is going to become zero when EVs come. There is not much to repair, right? So you have to make a very compelling product that sells just by being a very good product.
Mohit Yadav:
And then the OEM should have the option to sell things like subscriptions on top of that, like kind of what Volkswagen is doing with Electrify America, right? You buy a Volkswagen vehicle and you get to charge anywhere on the Electrify America network. So these subscriptions and personalization will become way more valuable as we move from ICE vehicles to EVs. So that's another, what you say, opportunity that service industry is going for a toss, so where the additional stream of revenues come from, that's going to come from software and subscription.
Cody Simms:
I've seen other models in emerging markets, I mean, not even just emerging markets, but you have companies like Gogoro in Taiwan, and we've seen a few... We actually had Mazi Mobility on the pod a couple weeks ago, which is another company that's building essentially this battery swapping model. So their perspective on emerging markets is, "Hey, the biggest cost of the EV is the battery, so what if we ship battery-less chassis and build a business model around the battery itself?" I'm curious how you see those playing out and if you see that being market-dependent. I mean, I assume there's room for both a BOLT-like strategy and a battery swapping-like strategy in the world, but you clearly have probably had to pay attention to those different go-to-market models as well.
Mohit Yadav:
Absolutely. I think it's a great question, Cody. Swapping versus charging is probably the biggest debate right now, if you look at it in the EV world. One of our investors in our company is Mr. Chetan Maini, who built the electric REVA and is championing SUN Mobility, the company that's leading on battery swapping. So we know where battery swapping will solve the needs and also the challenges. So battery swapping is really important because it empowers the fleets right now. People who are doing logistics and delivery boys, they don't have a time to charge. They don't have that much time, right? So it's solved for them immediately. And because those bikes are pretty much standardized, like all delivery bikes are going to look pretty much one or pretty much the same, so the probability that getting standardized when it comes to logistics is very high, I would say.
Mohit Yadav:
But when it comes to the consumer market, like a B2C kind of thing, the idea is I still support the idea that battery swapping solves a lot of issues, takes away half the cost of the vehicle and everything, but it's taking away half the cost of vehicle from the OEM as well and all the IP that they're building in battery tech. So they are really, really reluctant about battery swapping, all the big OEMs. Tesla did it, I think, some seven, eight years ago. They went back on it. Ather is not doing it. Ola is not doing it because they want that control over, first, over the BMS.
Mohit Yadav:
The battery IP that would be built is very core to the OEM. So it makes absolute sense right now in logistics, but OEMs are very reluctant to get into battery swapping because there are two ways it can happen, either you'll have a lot of battery swapping companies, which are incompatible with each other, right? That doesn't fall for anyone, right? Or you have a double-A or a triple-A equivalent of a battery that you have right now for your remote control and Xbox, that version of that kind of a standardization. But the day that happens, all the core IP is lost from the OEMs.
Cody Simms:
Well, I think that's my favorite part of where we are at this point in the deployment of EVs is there seem to be some tried and true models that are working in the United States and Europe and North America, but it feels like in many other parts of the world, we're just scratching the surface of figuring out what these markets are going to look like, especially when you look at two and three-wheeler EVs, where you said, it's not like there are five or six OEMs that are out there that are dominating market share. Like you said, there are hundreds of OEMs. And so, it feels like figuring out a solution for the market is going to take a while and likely there will be different solutions in different markets. I'm curious for you in that regard. You've gone to market heavily in India, which makes sense, that's where you're based, that's the market you know, but I believe you already have trials in some other markets around the world. I'm curious how you think about the expansion of BOLT's from a global perspective.
Mohit Yadav:
Absolutely. So, one of the key advantages that we really have when we started on this journey is that, like I was telling you about our days go going to China and integrating our software there, so we are already sitting at the source of the distribution when it comes to wherever these EVs would be sent. So if you drop our egos aside, we know that supply chains cannot be solved in a months time. You can't just move the servers. It's a harsh reality and that it's going to be dependent on the behemoths like China when it comes to it, right? So our plan, or we are already live in Africa, in multiple countries. We are doing our pilots right now in Thailand, Indonesia, everywhere. Thanks to our Chinese connects. They make these vehicles everyone is buying from China. As and when theses get shipped, our software gets shipped along with the vehicles. So that's how we look at it.
Mohit Yadav:
But India in itself is a huge, huge market. It's like pretty much a continent, like a subcontinent, but I think it's like so many countries combined. So we are hands down focused on India right now, but we do plan to expand. I think next one or two years, we'll start focusing on expanding the Southeast Asia, all the emerging markets, like Africa, South America, where cost is what really drives these decisions. So to give you an example, people who really switch to EVs first in India, where these e-rickshaw guys who were ferrying passengers from one metro station to other metro station, because they were doing maybe 2,000 bucks a day or something like that and all of a sudden they're running costs at one-fifth, right? So that is why people get it that they really, really want EVs. The total cost of ownership right now is maybe 10% more for a two-wheeler and three-wheeler, but the running cost is practically, I think, one-10th or one-fifth or one-sixth, something, in multiples, not in percentages if you look at it.
Cody Simms:
Define what you mean by running costs. Help me understand that.
Mohit Yadav:
So the cost you pay per mile compared to what you pay for an ICE vehicle, at least one fifth, in some cases, even one-10th, if you really look at it, right? So that's really influences the decision of the rider in these [inaudible 00:39:23].
Cody Simms:
Hence, the need to get good financing upfront terms on the purchase, right?
Mohit Yadav:
Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Everyone knows. Everyone really knows. If you go to any village, tier two, three or three cities in India, they know that they want to get an EV because they know they can always charge at home. They don't have to go to any petrol bunk ever, right? It'll cost them huge costs, right? Even people who ride bicycles right now, why they don't buy a petrol-based vehicle is that, "Okay. I'll buy a secondhand vehicle, but the running cost is too high." But if they get an electric vehicle, which is maybe an electric bike or maybe a simple scooty, there is no maintenance and the running cost is now practically zero.
Cody Simms:
So TCO may be slightly higher, but if I'm living month to month on a cash flow budget basis, my goal is to try to get my monthly budget as low as possible.
Mohit Yadav:
Yeah, absolutely. People who are using these vehicles, specifically the e-rickshaw drivers and the delivery boys, they are just renting all these vehicles, right? They are just outright cheap when it comes to any ICE-based vehicle, any rental vehicle you would get on ICE. So, we are seeing the same happen in Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam, all the Southeast Asia. Wherever you see bikes, I think EVs are going to come much sooner than later because when you make one car, I think you can make 10 bikes out of the same material.
Cody Simms:
Is the market expansion strategy to go to market with the embedded OS via the OEMs to start without even needing the charge point rolled out to begin with in that local economy, or do you try to ship everything at once?
Mohit Yadav:
No, it's going to be a mix. So, the way we really position ourselves as a charging point operator is that we do have offerings for cars and fast charging as well. You can access those. We'll be expanding that into the cars shortly. But the way we are positioned ourselves is that will be sold with every vehicle as an accessory. Just like you have a spike buster for your laptop and you're to protect your mobile phones and everything, it's a spike buster for your bike, right? You buy it with your bike. If it has an OS, it's great. Anyway, you have a charging point. So if an OEM sells our charging point, we can always convince them to sell our OS because then it's better integration. Then you don't even have to scan, pay or do anything.
Mohit Yadav:
If the vehicle has our OS and the charger has our OS, the vehicle simply needs to come near the charging point. It'll turn itself on. They'll talk to each other, exchange key parameters like temperature, sell SOC and all those things to provide a really, really safe charging experience. So, that's the ultimate experience, if you look at it, like an Apple ecosystem. But if they buy OEM, we can always push our charging points with the vehicle. If they put our charging point, we can always upsell our OS as well.
Cody Simms:
Today, are you manufacturing the charging points in India, or do you have some global supply chain constraints on manufacturing as well?
Mohit Yadav:
We supply the entire charging points in India, but when it comes to the operating system and the speedometer chipset, which are way more complex, we get the components from China and we get them assembled somewhere in India by one of the EMS manufacturers, but for any global... Because India has some really important rules because they want to encourage EV manufacturing in-house and indigenize the supply chain. Otherwise, it's going to be very difficult to solve for a country at a scale like India, right? So in India, we get the components and assemble them here. For the global market, they just ship it directly from China. That's it.
Cody Simms:
So you've started as a software business. Now, you have this hardware component. As a venture investor, I can do the math. That means you need some pretty significant funding to back the hardware component of the business you're building. Let's talk about the financing history of the company.
Mohit Yadav:
So, we raised about $4 million back in, I think, March or April. Back then, our company was in India, then now we moved to-
Cody Simms:
2021?
Mohit Yadav:
2021. Yeah. So we moved to Singapore to remain in a more neutral location. So with that, we could just not get caught up in the conflict between the big nations. So, that's the most diplomatic place we could really be. So we got that. The money really hit our account. The entire restructuring took about six months. And then we quickly raised another $20 million in December again from existing investors and their LPs.
Cody Simms:
Fantastic. For the hardware component, do you feel like you'll also need to raise some debt capital to fund operations or to-date you're funding everything with venture dollars?
Mohit Yadav:
No, it depends. It depends on the kind of business that we are entering. If it's a consumer product, like a BOLT charging point that is supposed to be sold with your vehicle, in that case, it's a pure play distribution business, right? The product has to sell for itself, the standard distribution model, whatever it's there. So you make some percent of margin on the hardware. That has to be a profitable business. Otherwise, the cost of setting up charging infra is too high for a country to bear, right? So, that is why it has to become a commodity. That is one thing.
Mohit Yadav:
But if it comes at things like, "Hey, deploy hundred fast charges for us." If you give us that kind of commodity, then we would rather go and explore debt-based financing or something like that, where the buyer gives us a minimum guarantee of the transaction on per month and then you can get the debt-based financing. Honestly, in the long run, we do not want to make hardware. We want to make schematics and reference diagrams, which other people can see and make their own hardware. We give our software just like that, you take it. Our hardware design is any way open source. We don't [inaudible 00:44:42].
Cody Simms:
In an ideal world, the Belkin's of the world and whatnot are building the future of the BOLT charge points.
Mohit Yadav:
Make it yourselves. Make it yourselves. Here's an architecture. We have open source schematics. We have open source the Gerbers and everything. So anyone can make an hardware. Our idea is to really become the Android or Alexa of the world, where the SD can run on any hardware. We started building hardware because no one built it for us, Cody, back we were only too young.
Cody Simms:
What are the next big assumptions to sort out? What are the big hypotheses that you don't know the answer to yet?
Mohit Yadav:
Yeah. I think what's going to be really interesting is that we've seen the traditional charge point operation business mature in developed countries, like America, Europe, everywhere, right? We really need to see how we can create a network that is maintained by the community. It's a shared... How do you incentivize the shared upkeep of a network? How do you reward the early participants? How do you reward people who took this journey early with us, right? How does the experience really look like? Because a lot of chargers also mean a lot of them might not work because maybe someone is not coming. It's up to the user. So how do you solve for that? How do you incentivize user behavior? How do you generate demand and all those things?
Mohit Yadav:
So even in a country like Norway, where the EV infrastructure has caught up with the EV sales, the top utilization of the network is maybe 30% on a very good day, right? So public charging is going to take some time for the revenues to kick in. We want to see whether this shared up network upkeep is going to bring enough value and is sustainable or not. That is what we are trying to experiment with.
Cody Simms:
Fantastic. Mohit, what should I have asked that I haven't asked?
Mohit Yadav:
I think your podcast has been really great. I think you're really exhausted with your questions.
Cody Simms:
You're tired.
Mohit Yadav:
Not really.
Cody Simms:
It's late at night for you. I get it.
Mohit Yadav:
Nothing like that. We are already working on solutions that would allow you to charge your bike in one hour with the same BOLT charging point. We are working on fast-charging technologies with the OEMs, because for that, you need the OS jobs. If you're not building the operating system, the vehicle and charger are not talking to each other, it's going to be very difficult, but that is some cool tech to really watch out for. I think we'll have something in maybe a quarter or so, where you can charge your vehicle real fast just with the BOLT charging point in one hour.
Cody Simms:
How can the MCJ community, who's listening to this, how can they help? We've got people listening here who are engineers. We've got people listening here are product people. We've got people listening who are work in finance, work in policy. Where do you all need the most help right now?
Mohit Yadav:
Well, we need some exposure. We had zero marketing until for five years. It was just 15 engineers. Jyoti was all things sales, everything. So we just started with the marketing, so if some people could just spread the word. We are also actively hiring for key engineering roles and things like that. So yeah, just would like our voices to be heard that we are doing something interesting in India, and if this concept of shared building a charging infrastructure, which is built by the community and the users of the charging network resonates with anyone and would like to deploy the same charging network in their country, who would like to give it a go.
Mohit Yadav:
I was reading this blog about America, that although there are a lot fast-charging points, but there are still queues. At the peak hours, people are always waiting, right? You can always put a level two charging point, which is way more affordable, maybe just a thousand bucks in a restaurant or something like that and you can just share it, right? The same concept also applies for us much cost-affordable charging point that can be put for cars as well. So, the concept is really global. We have tried it on multiple countries. Yeah. If anyone resonates with our vision, we would really like to work with them. So, that's the entire ask of the MCJ.
Cody Simms:
Thanks, Mohit. Well, listen, obviously, climate change is a global problem. MCJ, we try to highlight solutions that are coming to light all around the world. We want to do more and more of that. So thanks for being here and being, I think, our first guest that's truly, really focused on the Indian subcontinent. Obviously, you have plans to expand from beyond there, but it's great to hear how you're taking a solution and making it unique for the market in which you live and operate that potentially has legs to work in many markets all around the world. So thanks for your time today and for sharing your story with us.
Mohit Yadav:
Thank you so much, Cody. It was a pleasure.
Jason Jacobs:
Hey, everyone. Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co. Note, that is dot C-O, not dot com. Someday we'll get the dot com, but right now, dot C-O. You can also find me on Twitter @jjacobs22, where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers made me say that. Thank you.
