Electric vehicle financing startup Vidyut on Thursday said it has secured $4 million (Rs 32 crore) in a mix of equity and debt funding co-led by Force Ventures and Veda VC.
The round also saw participation from a host of strategic angel investors including Sujeet Kumar (Udaan), Sahil Barua (Delhivery), Kunal Shah (Cred), Sriharsha Majety (Swiggy) and Rajat Verma (Lohum).
The Bengaluru-based firm will deploy the fresh proceeds to scale up its offering across original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners and geographies. Besides, it also aims to onboard talents across credit, engineering and sales.
Founded in 2021, Vidyut is a platform which manages to extract a high residual value for EVs, helping customers get an effective interest rate of as low as 7%. The company offers ownership solutions for Mahindra, Altigreen Euler and OSM vehicles.
“The biggest consumer need to unlock commercial EV adoption is smart financing. While OEMs are pushing the frontiers of EV tech, the market has lagged in innovating on the financing front. The lifecycle and the ownership journey of an electric ride are very different from those of an ICE vehicle. The market needs financing solutions tailored for EVs,” said Xitij Kothi, co-founder at Vidyut.
“In a short period, Vidyut has demonstrated a user value proposition and product-market fit, both on the side of customers buying vehicles as well as financial services stakeholders, who depend on the platform’s proprietary models and technology solutions,” said Karthik Bhat, partner at Force Ventures.
Venture capital funding in India’s EV space has been continuing for the past few years though it has gained traction only lately.
India’s EV market is expected to record a compound annual growth rate of 90% to touch $150 billion by 2030, consulting firm RBSA Advisors said in a recent report.
A total of 429,217 EVs are sold this financial year so far, more than a threefold rise from the 134,821 units in FY21, according to the Federation of Automobile Dealership Associations of India (Fada).