A scooter designed from scratch
Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain started Ather Energy in 2013 to build an electric scooter in India, not assemble an imported one. IIT Madras was among its early backers. The first prototype was shown in February 2016.
Why Hosur
Ather signed with the Tamil Nadu government in December 2019 and opened its Hosur factory on 2 January 2021, able to make about 1.1 lakh scooters and 1.2 lakh battery packs a year. Hosur gave it what a young manufacturer needs: an hour from its Bengaluru engineers, and a town full of suppliers and trained workers from 40 years of vehicle making.
An hour from its engineers, in a town full of suppliers.
Listed, and still investing
Ather listed on India’s stock exchanges in May 2025. In its latest reported year it had revenue of about ₹3,672 crore and was still making a loss, about ₹517 crore, as it spent on factories, products and its own charging network.
A success story does not always mean a profit yet. It means a product, a factory and customers built from nothing in about ten years, on a plateau that had made mopeds forty years earlier.
Points for a finance reader
- Build where the suppliers already are. Hosur’s vehicle workshops shortened the road from design to factory.
- Read the losses, not just the growth. Revenue can grow while losses continue. Ask what the spending is building.
- Make the hard part yourself. Building its own battery packs kept the key cost and know-how in house.