Yulu developing e-scooter for individual buyers, says Co-founder & CEO Amit Gupta

Amit Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO, Yulu.

Yulu, a shared electric mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) player, is working on rolling out a low-speed e-scooter for individual users. This is part of the plan of the company, which caters in large part to daily commuters (via Yulu Miracle) and last-mile delivery executives (through Yulu Dex), to begin selling its products directly to end-users.

“A number of our customers have reached out to us expressing interest in buying our shared mobility vehicles for personal use. Though the e-scooter will be all-new, it will have a lot of things common with our existing products, as this reduces our R&D costs. We have been thinking about this for a while and will soon come out with a Yulu (product) for personal mobility. We will disclose the relevant details at the appropriate time,” Amit Gupta, Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Yulu, told Moneycontrol in an exclusive interaction.

Yulu’s current Generation 2 and Generation 3 electric vehicles (EVs), which are part of its MaaS fleet, are not available for sale as personal vehicles. The Bangalore-based start-up offers time-based plans for its shared mobility services. For short distances, it offers a pay-per-minute plan of Rs 2 per minute, while heavy users can use the weekly rental plans, which start at Rs 229 per day, and go on till Rs 1,200 per week.

“Even though we have made a lot of improvements in our shared mobility-specific vehicles, we will be fine-tuning them further to make them user-friendly for consumers who wants to make an outright purchase,” added Gupta.

On the business model, Gupta said, “Earlier, it was a ‘scooter-as-a-service’ offering. Now it will be a battery-as-a-service (BaaS) offering. While the consumer can buy the vehicle, for the battery he can go for the subscription model. It will be very similar to what Gogoro is doing in Taiwan.”

Gupta did not disclose details about the price of the vehicle or the rates of the service offering.

It may be recalled that Yulu has joined hands with Bajaj Auto to roll out the third generation of its e-scooters Miracle GR and DeX GR for retail and commercial users, respectively.

Yulu, which has completed more than 200 million kilometres in distance travelled, is looking to deploy around one lakh Generation 2 and Generation 3 shared EVs (both B2B and B2C consumers), largely in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru by the end of 2023.

Early this week, Yulu announced a tie-up with food delivery app Zomato for use of the Yulu DeX EV for intra-city deliveries. The e-scooter rental firm said that around 25,000-35,000 Yulu DeX EV will be given to delivery partners onboarded on Zomato’s platform for last-mile deliveries, on custom-made rental plans.

Yulu has raised $118.2 million till date. Of this, a sizeable chunk came out of the $82-million Series B funding round led by Magna International Inc. in September 2022.  Yulu is now looking to raise funds via debt. It would need another $500 million in the next three years, to fund its plans to deploy one million vehicles in the next three-four years and commission over 500 battery charging and swapping stations in the next 12 months. In November last year, Yulu received confirmation for a $9-million loan from US-based Development Finance Corporation (DFC).

“Unlike a typical OEM which builds and then sells vehicles to customers, we pay to the OEM (Bajaj Auto) upfront, and then get paid by the customers over a period of one-and-a-half years to two years. Assuming that a vehicle costs, on average, $500 per piece, and the company deploys one million vehicles over the next three to four years, we will require approximately $500 million. Most of this money will be in the form of debt capital," revealed Gupta.

Meanwhile, Yulu posted a turnover of Rs 30 crore in financial year 2021-22 (FY22). For FY23, the company is looking to record 8X growth.