Ep 11 Ather Energy Tarun Mehta On Engineering Scale And Indias Tech Future

TITLE: Ep:11 Ather Energy | Tarun Mehta on Engineering, Scale and India’s Tech Future CHANNEL: NPCI DATE: 2026-06-23 ---TRANSCRIPT--- I would say philosophically, any strategy [music] which which does not rely on us having an engineering edge. We are by DNA a little circumspect that why should we pursue it? I think it’s a great great decision.

[music] So, what EVs are really unlocking is a lot of these features which are gate-kept. You couldn’t do traction control, you couldn’t do cruise control, you couldn’t do cooling, you couldn’t do a lot of these fancy stuff which actually improve consumers’ experiences. Going electric is really opening up the doorway for all of this. When the Japanese export [music] bullet trains, they are also exporting the bullet train with that export, they’re also exporting all the standards that come with it. We need to learn how as a country we should really be aggressive. Wherever we’ve taken a lead, solidify the lead by creating a standard tsunami out of it. This is not about Ather, it’s not even about our industry. This is about our country. We need to really learn this as we become richer and we become stronger. [music] Welcome to NPCI’s Innovator Playground podcast. We have a guest today, Mr. Tarun Mehta. Uh he has built one of the best engineering companies in India. Tarun, thank you so much for joining us in this podcast. Thanks for having me over, Tarun. What are the top-of-the-mind thoughts as you continue your journey to grow? Starting off Ather really traces its way back to this conviction. Uh both of us were young engineers and yeah, me and Swapnil. And we spent several years trying to start a company in the energy domain. And though the earlier attempts hadn’t worked out, the conviction that I built up over several attempts was that we’ve got to count on the engineering muscle here. Like that that that we can build something. A lot of kudos to IIT Madras particularly because it created in that in the exact years we were in are the years when this entire culture started coming up of building uh, in the campus. So, we were one of the earliest batches that experienced it and I think that really had a big impact on us. I think by the time we graduated, there was this very deeply developed solid confidence that uh, engineering to curling here like banana here. Uh, so the confidence that we can build something had gone up quite a lot. The product DNA came a much later in our case, but the engineering confidence came much earlier. In fact, when we were starting of Ather, we joked that we will only hire engineers in this company. Not not the most correct principle, but funnily we actually stuck to it for the first 300 employees. That’s quite a size. Yeah, including HR, creatives, sales. Everybody was an engineer. Everybody was an engineer by training. So, we really pushed this as much as we could before obviously we realized that we need a lot of diversity and the team expanded. But, I I think those early years created the the kind of mindset in the company that we can build. We can we can build a lot. We can build anything that anywhere else can be built in the world. And we obviously owe a lot to this thought process. A lot of what Ather is today good at has happened because we have counted we’ve bet on engineering to deliver that outcome. Whether it is the product or it is the chargers or it is the charging infrastructure or it is the software experiences, it’s all on the back of that fundamental promise. And we continue to build on that. a first principle for your organization in that sense. In fact, more than first principles, I I would say philosophically, any strategy which which does not rely on us having an engineering edge, we are I think by DNA a little circumspect that why should we pursue it? It will be a good strategy. It’ll be a good strategy for many others. But why why should Ather pursue something if there is no engineering and product mode behind the entire approach? Uh so it’s become deeply philosophical now in the entire company’s DNA. Now at the stage of growth where where you are, uh you have shown impeccable uh kind of uh outcomes to the market. The consumers are very satisfied. What’s going on your mind now? Actually, primary thing that comes in my mind every once in a while in over the last year is leverage. And let me explain what I mean by that. We’ve spent 13 years as a startup building out a lot of the foundational pieces. Uh and the foundational pieces I’m not actually just saying tech, I’m also saying the organization. Yeah. We We had the product and the core tech even in 2018. But we didn’t have an organization then. So, every time we wanted to build something new, it was just this complete blank canvas. Okay, like how do we start building this? We don’t know. And we would approach this very naively. We spent several years after that building a new org structure where, you know, our end goal always has been we want to build a engine of an organization that can churn out products. It’s taken a lot of time, but we now finally feel we have that. Like as a founder, we can imagine a product and there is an entire engine laid out that can convert that that that literal pitch into a concept and then a prototype and then very quickly a fully scaled up industrialized product. So, what’s going on my mind is just wow, that is amazing leverage. I I don’t know how many founders in India on on hardware side have you experienced this before? It sometimes just shocks you that you have this entire engine behind you that can actually put this out predictably year after year. So, we want to use this. We want to use this leverage. We want to build a lot. We started building a helmet a while ago. We’re building more two-wheelers. We are We’re trying to go international. We’re pushing on standards a lot. We’re pushing the envelope with what we can do with software. And there’s so many ideas and and for the first time we feel not overpowered by the ideas, but but you get a sense of leverage behind you. That’s Yeah, let the ideas come. Now we can actually start putting them in a nice bundle and they can keep coming out. So, how do you look at this whole integration story? And if you can dissect that for us uh So, vertical integration is a is a slightly confusing term Yeah. uh from my perspective because I feel like in India we use vertical integration for one and one reason only, which is manufacturing integration. And I think it kind of betrays a fairly old kind of thinking. I think as a country we’ve spent the last 100 years essentially struggling to barely just be a manufacturing house. We haven’t had the luxury. We haven’t had the the space to actually be a engineering and a design house. And hence every time anybody says vertical integration, your mind just goes on to oh, you’re not just producing vehicles, but you also have a paint shop. You’re not just doing the painting, you also probably are doing something in the raw materials. Backward integration backward integration. You want to own the own the mine, right? And that’s good. That that that’s good. It just It definitely gives you more margin. But me and Swapnil, I think both of us really want to make Ather stand out as an example of what else you can do with vertical integration. Yeah. I think the opportunity and and the far more richer opportunity is not just in owning more and more of the factory. It is in actually owning more and more of the tech because that’s really where the opportunity lies. The manufacturing is no longer changing that fast. Yes, obviously there’s more industrial automation coming in and you’ve got to play on the front foot there. But what’s happening with power electronics, what’s happening with embedded hardware, what’s happening with software, what’s happening with batteries, what’s happening with charging? In a fast-changing technology environment, we believe that the winners will be companies who will go straight to the silicon and will design that point onwards, which means you need to own more and more of the design in-house. You need to have the mechanicals and the electricals and the software and the design happening under the same office. That’s when you actually get better integration, that’s when you get better cost structures, and that’s when you’re able to unlock newer experiences, which this integrator model doesn’t work very well for. Most people think, “Oh, you want to do vertical integration? So, you will produce that component in-house.” I want to argue that do that if you feel like it, you want to put that capex, but the bigger upside is you want to vertically integrate, design that entire thing in-house. Bring the IP and design of that component in-house. There’s a lot of work, interesting work happening on suspension suspension tech, definitely braking technology these days. A lot of work happening in our industry on cooling. Uh two-wheelers don’t get cooling, but you can build this. What Actually, the biggest thing that’s happening in EV two-wheelers is not electrification. It’s actually the fact that once you move to electric, your powertrain goes electric, your control over everything just goes sky-rockets. So, for example, uh we can build traction control. Two-wheelers in India do not have traction control. We can build traction control at a 100 rupee cost increase because everything is there. Yeah. You already have a motor controller on which you have 100 hertz control. Uh so, you can use that to essentially flip it and make it a traction control unit. You can flip it to make it a uh some sort of an ABS unit. Uh there’s been a lot of talk recently about making anti-lock braking system ABS uh mandatory in two-wheelers in India. And there’s been a lot of pushback because that’s 10,000 rupee cost increase. Electric vehicles, if architected correctly, can do ABS-like technology at a 100 to 100 rupee cost increase. Yes. So, what EVs are really unlocking is a lot of these features which were gate kept. You couldn’t do traction control. You couldn’t do cruise control. You couldn’t do cooling. You couldn’t do a lot of these fancy stuff which actually improve consumers experience, right? They make the product safer. Your riding becomes easier. So, safety can go up, complexity can come down. Going electric is really opening up the doorway for all of this. And that’s what we are excited about. How critical is this edge for you, right? How are you looking at this whole edge? And what’s the power right now and how are you looking at in the long run? We actually are at a bit of a conflicting point in our journey. Let me give you a little bit of background. 12 years ago when we started imagining this architecture, we took a little bit of a bet that two wheelers will benefit by having a fairly powerful compute on the vehicle. To put that processor, and once you have the processor and you have a strong interface which at that point was imagined as a 7-in touchscreen dashboard. So, you have an interface and you have compute. You will imagine features later. Yeah, right. We were not sure. I think it’s a great great decision. But it took time. Because the only use case that we could imagine honestly, like hand on heart, was Google Maps on or like some navigation. So, we just said key, let’s put compute and let’s put a interface on the two wheeler. Starting and seeded with couple of use cases and let’s see where this train goes. Honestly, the train didn’t go anywhere because the problem was the earliest iterations of the hardware that we could afford on a two wheeler were massively underpowered. And connectivity with which we started back in that era was 2G. So, your connectivity was not amazing. Your hardware was the one that you were putting on was not cutting edge by any stretch and was just not enough. So, everything was super laggy. Everything was annoying. Luckily, we were selling a really premium thing to really high-end buyers for which this was like a sprinkling on top of a cake, whether it worked or not. Yeah. And I think the decision that we locked out on was to insist that we are going to package this in irrespective of whether it is super useful to you or not. Because we want to basically have a justification internally of continuing to develop things behind it. Because that’ll take a few years. Over the years, our entire industry saw this evolution that because we kept putting this touchscreen dashboard with compute, every competitor who came on also had to match specs. So, they also had to put a touchscreen dashboard. I remember one of these conversations happened with one of the largest suppliers for HMI for a two-wheeler in the world. And they came to the office and they were talking about solutions. And somewhere along the line, you know, we broke for coffee and and they started walking and they even said, “I don’t know what we pitched you guys here because you guys in India seem to have gone far ahead of what we are developing for the global markets. We are talking about like basic LCD displays. You guys are talking about like full-on touchscreen dashboards already with a lot like Qualcomm processors. We are not there yet.” And that’s reality. Indian two-wheeler market today is the absolute cutting edge of HMI on two-wheelers of software features anywhere in the world because of this set of decisions that happened. So, that’s kind of kept compounding. Now, we are at a little bit of a interesting point because yes, the HMI has become quite interesting, quite valuable. But the new bit that we have is we want to use between edge or cloud LLMs and smart helmets. So, we have a team at Ather whose vision is to use the helmet interface to essentially make the HMI interface irrelevant. Uh the argument being that why do you need to look down? Like you’re not watching a full-on TV. You just need a bit of HUD on the on the visor. Not legal yet, but so one completely counter vision is, you know what, we we we’ve got to make HMI irrelevant. We’ve got to move completely to voice and sound. Something that didn’t have a chance of working in the past, but with what’s happening with LLMs, what’s happening with voice recognition, what’s happening with speed of compute, yeah, we could probably pull it off. So, we had a little bit of a like divergence here. Internally in the company, the value that it is delivering is already way far exceeds that the cost that it accrues to the end user. So, another thing that we that we have discovered and our industry is starting to discover is that the Indian consumer is actually willing to pay a reasonable amount of money at scale for access to connected features which use cloud and 4G 5G connectivity all the time. And the cost of that entire thing far is far far far lower than what the consumer is willing to pay already in India. The most amazing part which you have not spoken, which I personally like is you made a decision to go to Android. From a day zero. You know, that gives you a completely open Yes. story to run apps and leverage the way you want. Yes. That makes sense. Yeah. How did this decision came in? Same thought process. That we want to have control over our hardware. We want to have control over design. Uh so, we’re not going to have tier ones on a fast-moving piece of tech. Anything that’s basically accelerating super fast as far as technology goes, we want to own the engineering there. Because and not because suppliers are bad, but because suppliers are two levels removed from the end consumer. So, their ability to understand what the market needs and build to that before the OEM ask for it is basically not there. So, an OEM will have to see an OEM will have to convert that into a spec and the OEM will have to spec it out for multiple partners to bid. no, no, no, no, no, no, yeah. And partners are ultimately defined by the hardware that they build, right? So, now if you build the HMI for me and another person builds the I don’t know, the motor controller for me, they can never talk to each other, right? Apart from going via us. But what if I want to merge these modules? What if I want them to work tightly together? So, bringing your design and IP in house for the fast-moving pieces of tech, I think it can be very valuable. But can we say that this battery and the distance and the cost of it is is like a holy grail for uh EV? What is your road map on that part? Battery prices will always play a fundamental role. I I think the good news is our industry has brought it down largely to its commodity cost. Uh the proprietary part of the cell technology, fatty cost structures, you know, because the ecosystem is not developed. I think a lot of that is vaporized. So, if commodities are not crazy, lithium ion cell prices these days or any emerging chemistry that’s coming up is actually super attractive and it allows for easy easy transition from ice to EV because your TCO advantage is beautiful. Battery cost is no longer very high. Obviously, what you don’t control is commodities. What if cobalt becomes like 5x’s or what if lithium 10x’s? Correct. But that can happen to you. But that to like aluminum is up 30%. Like copper is up whatever, two, three, four times. Uh so, you don’t control everything. So, that aside, actually battery cost has become largely a commodity conversation, uh which is which is a crazy thing that’s happened. When we started, battery was this black box super proprietary. It it it sounded like semiconductors, right? Because it was hard to produce and it was priced like it. Today, it is still very hard to produce, but batteries have become like commodities, uh but really the cells, I mean. And most of the IP and most of the value has moved uh up to integration of the battery pack, of the algorithms in the battery management system. So, having dynamic algorithms does play a lot of a lot of role there. I’m so glad that a lot of our engineering heads in 10 years ago made the right kind of architectural decisions. Without those decisions, like if OTAs were not were not compatible a lot of the story wouldn’t have played out. And it’s so much harder to change your platforms later. A lot of values moved there because again, it is very dynamic and the industry is staying dynamic with it. Fantastic. While this whole battery swapping system is not possible in the in the cars, but what it’s it should be clearly possible in the in the two-wheelers. But the evolution of quick commerce, you know, you could get a charged battery from Blinkit, Zepto and and and just swap it out and do it. But do you think it will get unbundled over the period when the cost drops? There’ve always been two levels of challenges with swapping in a two-wheeler. There is an engineering challenge and then there’s a product challenge. The engineering challenge is you’re adding another level of interface, right? In a tightly integrated product, the battery does not have a interface with the vehicle. It’s fixed and it’ll remain fixed. Nobody gets to remove it every day, slide things in and out. The minute you create that interface, what are the problems? Let’s talk in simple terms. What if you’re sliding the battery pack in and your hand slips and the battery pack falls from 1 ft while sliding in the the shell there. It’ll fall from a feet, it’ll break the terminals, it’ll probably catch fire. You want to avoid that, overinvest in the terminals, make the battery pack stronger, invest in more metal around it. That cost, that takes weight, reduces range, makes it more expensive. I get it. What if water accidentally seeps in? That could short circuit the entire thing. You can’t seal against it. So, there’s always been an engineering problem. It adds a lot of cost. So, you don’t think at least in the near future it’s moving to Actually, bigger problem now is product more than engineering. The bigger problem is product, which means what I mean by that is See, sure, if you’re a gig economy use case, it is still relevant because charging is not yet fast enough. What you have done on the standards creation on charging, this whole energy network conversation which is going on now and you know, how is going to pan out. What are your views on on this? You know, I think uh a reversal on standards. Yeah. It’s high time we learn as a country how to spam out standards in industries where we are leaders and not hold back. Outside of really limited examples like NPCI, we’ve really really not had much of an opportunity. You had a great thought to kind of donate back the the standards. So, that that actually that was our first experience. And we we actually are now trying to to make make it a case study for us internally. We opened up our charging standard. We took it to BIS. We And that I think was the first example of an indigenously created standard in auto becoming a national standard. The code does not sit with us. And hence it is IC compatible. The next battle that we are now fighting there is that listen, we have now the standard in India. Can we take this Indian standard and have the world adopt it? The European Union, EU as a whole or or the European Commission has done a really wonderful job in standards creation. Absolutely. And I’ve seen that time and again with whether it’s you know, recently I saw that they told Apple to to open the secure element free of cost, free of cost to everybody. They have also built up the the standards on phone charging, right? Correct. The C type and Correct. said everybody must go back there. I think somewhere the EU, if you make an effort with the commission itself, I think that can help you do instead of looking at the individual countries because they’re very good in standard setting. Absolutely, Dilip. And we need to learn this because let me make a more larger point here. This is not about Ather. It’s not even about our industry. This is about our country and how we need to really learn this as we become richer and we become stronger in more and more technologies. If you are leaders in any tech and you want to get the full value out of it, not just in India but outside, but if you do not pair that by making it easy for the world to use by writing a standard for it and then propagating that standard outside, essentially if you do not do a standard capture, there is a almost guarantee that over a 10-year period you would have pioneered everything. However, people who would know how to convert this into a easily usable standard will write a different standard which, because the rest of the world now needs, it’ll flip back and your companies will now have to learn how to use those standards which, surprise surprise, the best suppliers who know how to build to that standard are not in India. I keep making this example. When the Japanese export bullet trains, they’re not just exporting the bullet train in a nice little package. With that export, they’re also exporting all these standards that come with it, right? The the the kind of the kind of glasses that you need in a bullet train, the kind of bolts that you need, the kind of steel that you need, right? And obviously, and and rightfully so, the best suppliers for that glass, the best suppliers for that steel, the best suppliers for that steel will not be an Indian company. It’ll be a Japanese company. We should learn from them. We need to learn how as a as a country we should really be aggressive. Wherever we have taken a lead, solidify the lead by creating a standard tsunami out of it. Great point. Uh what about the energy network which uh you know EI unified energy network or you know we’ve been working with the the heavy industries ministry to create a charging uh network. What do you think this network can help out in in the long run? I think particularly as EVs grow, uh two-wheelers and cars, we need to think of a more decentralized energy economy in the future where I I think uh for example, if all vehicles were to go electric tomorrow, you need a very different kind of energy management to even charge EVs tomorrow. And if you’re going to have EVs at that scale, EVs need to play a very critical role in balancing and stabilizing the grid. And the foundation for a lot of this will trace back to what you guys are all doing in the energy And it’s like managing up the the demand supply, you know. Managing demand supply. Correct. And it’s any which way all the grids are interconnected. So, I think that’s a great thing. I think that we are very close. We still have a few missing pieces. I I heard of some of the good ideas that that that that the group has. And we need to act on it. For example, time of day metering at the retail layer uh needs to go mainstream. People need to start seeing the benefit of it. And and incentives need to be incentivized. But all of this needs to come in because I it’s inevitable that India will become a largely electric nation. Uh fossil fuel is not a future. So, it’s not just the generation, distribution, storage, but the application layer. EVs are the application layer along with many other things. So, uh a unified thinking of the energy ecosystem is quite crucial. I’m very happy to see that if if we can today plan those ideas and move in that direction. Do you think the mechanical the foundational courses in engineering colleges will also start gaining a value back because the companies like you are going to value that talent who’s who are really good in that in that process? I hope and pray so. I really hope and pray so. I I I I I think if we have to become an engineering powerhouse as a country and I think we have that shot now. We need to discover the love back of the more fundamental sciences of engineerings beyond just basic coding. But ultimately, there are only so many jobs that architects can have in software. But man oh man, you need a lot of manufacturing engineering. You need a ton of industrial engineering. In fact, one thing that I’m personally really really really bullish on is uh manufacturing engineering, understanding of, you know, tools, dies, precision engineering, all of that, Uh metal, castings, uh all of this good stuff. One is the process, second is the raw material, you know, experimentation on that part. Uh how does the the whole talent attraction and and retention work, sir, at Ether? I think in a startup, it all boils down to what the founders are excited about. If the founders are not super excited about engineering, net net, you’re not going to retain and attract great engineering talent. It’s pretty simple. What the founders are very excited about is hopefully also a thing that, you know, the founders made a moat out of, right? Your differentiations come out of that area. Which also means you will push the most in that area, right? We I I just hope that we remain true to that, we remain honest to that, that we still remain pretty excited about engineering. And hence, it just automatically will hopefully will continue creating this climate internally where great engineers will find a very transparent or or or a very very direct work environment, where they don’t have to go through layers. How do you manage your time? How do you balance your day out between uh the hands-on job was thinking job or or the future? I think uh mostly in my case, I like getting bored. I really like getting bored. So, every few years, if I don’t have a phase where, you know, I can genuinely afford to get completely bored, uh I I start panicking. Uh uh I try creating a situation internally so that I can step back and really get bored. Uh I personally always felt you’re really at your thinking best when you have nothing else to think about. Like you have to bore yourselves to to to a great idea or to a great insight. And I don’t think reading a lot of books helps with that. I think it just floods your mind with too many things. Karan, we have two uh employees who want to ask a question. Uh Swati Pandey, who has been there with us for a long time now, senior lead in business and in mobility solutions at the NPC in Chennai. She wants to understand what would be the top three capabilities or mindset uh which she could uh prioritize. I have generally experienced that the best situation to land upon is to become really really good with numbers. It might seem inane in a world of AI. Uh why do you need to be good with numbers? Because if you can do both, think of the story and think of the numbers numbers together together with the story, I think you become really really really powerful analyst and I think you become a really powerful business storyteller. Fantastic. Fantastic. Ankit Sharma, uh senior associate product development uh Bharat Connect in Mumbai. And uh his question actually is the one of the questions I wanted to ask you. Mhm. That as as Ather uh growing now, you know, how do you stay fast? Mhm. Uh because the scale normally slows you down, right? In that sense. Uh which you have seen in most of the large organizations. Yeah. Yeah. And how do you remain uh really uh competitive, fast, and and innovative uh even when you’re large enough now? It is hard. We do struggle with it as I think most companies growing do. Uh the thing that seems to help uh is continue to decentralize as much as possible. These are actually two two very different things. Decentralize massively in in an org structure. Yeah. Uh empower the leaf layer, like the last part of your a lot more. So, structurally set up your org structure or or set Uh uh set up your working style for a lot of decentralization while at the same time retaining a ridiculous amount of direct control and oversight right at the founders. So, two very opposite thing. When you connect down the operating layers instead of talking to, you know, a vice president of data insights, you talk directly to the person building uh the dashboard for you and you’re directly discussing feedback with them. That no, I want this metric to move here. I want to see this. Can you you show me data in this way? It also lets It also helps them get a lot more visibility. And it helps them understand how the founders thinking directly a lot more. Fantastic. Thank you so much Tarun for spending time with us. I’m sure the young engineers are going to take inspiration from you, what you have done, how you have done, and and what you continue to make Ather as uh one of the best engineering companies not only in India in the world. So, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure, Tarun. Thanks. Thank you. Yeah. To the viewers, please do subscribe and like our podcast and and do let us know your feedback in the comment section.