AdvantEdge backs micro-mobility startup ElecTorq

Shared mobility solutions startup ElecTorq Technologies has raised an undisclosed sum in a seed funding round from venture capital firm AdvantEdge Partners in exchange for a minority stake.

The company will use the funds to design and get its first product to market, Ridhish Talwar, partner at AdvantEdge, told TechCircle.

“The company is a design and hardware company, hence requires limited capital to scale… They are building next generation mobility hardware form factors for micro mobility use cases,” Kunal Khattar, managing partner at AdvantEdge, told TechCircle separately.

The New Delhi-based startup manufactures Baaz I, a solo self-ride electric scooter, which is expected to find a clientele in the country's shared mobility players such as Rapido, Yulu, Bounce, Zapp and Vogo, co-founder and CEO Anubhav Sharma told TechCircle.

Its next version Baaz II would be an e-micro scooter, which aims to target food and hyper local delivery, while Baaz III is planned to be a two-seater vehicle.

Founded in January last year, the startup’s founding team consists of IIT Delhi alumni Sharma, Shubham Srivastava, Sahil Malik, Karan Singla and Abhijeet Saxena. They were members of the Axlr8r Formula Racing (AFR) team at their alma mater, developed three electric cars for Formula racing together and represented India twice at the world championships of Formula Student Germany, an international design competition.

The startup has a first mover advantage, Sharma said, citing how the current market is filled with inferior quality hardware-producing players from China. ElecTorq’s e-scooters are embedded with smart sensors that are connected to the cloud, providing all-round fleet management solutions and not just the manufacturing.

“All operators running e-scooters in India have launched products exported by Chinese manufacturers in complete knock-down (CKD) form and which are then assembled in India,” Ridhish Talwar said in a blogpost separately.

“We realised the need to design and build vehicles from the ground up for shared mobility platforms that take into account the local Indian conditions and hence are excited about the potential of ElecTorq,” Khattar added.

Apart from early-stage funding, AdvantEdge also runs incubation programmes for pre-product market-fit startups. It has backed startups such as Rapido, Shuttl, Tripoto, Sheru, TrulyMadly, OnlineTyari, Chalo, ScoopWhoop, IIMJobs, GamingMonk and FrontPage.