Ather Energy started as an EV idea in a hostel room at IIT Madras.
In 2012, Tarun Mehta walked away from a steady engineering job at Ashok Leyland to work out of a lab inside IIT Madras with his batchmate, Swapnil Jain.
In 2013, Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain turned a shared vision for hardware into Ather Energy.
13 years later, Ather’s growth has pushed its Hosur plant to over 90% capacity, reflecting strong demand.
Key highlights:
🔹 FY26 volumes up 69% YoY to ~2.63 lakh units; revenue up 66% to ₹3,671 crore
🔹 Net loss narrowed to ₹517 crore, with Ather posting positive operating cash flow for the first time
🔹 Factory 3.0, a new plant in Maharashtra, fast-tracked for phased operations before end-2026
🔹 A $200 million institutional share sale lined up in July 2026 to fund the plant, retail, and R&D
🔹 The upcoming EL platform will push Ather into the ₹1-1.25 lakh mass segment for the first time
Interestingly, this capacity crunch isn a result of demand pulled by the Rizta, a family scooter that took Ather’s share of “Middle India” from 4% to over 17% in a single year.
That’s a distinctly Indian problem to have. Norway hit 98% BEV share of new car sales in Q1 2026, and Finland crossed 47%, up from 33.8% just a year earlier, but neither country built its own EV industry to get there. They bought their way in, importing German, Korean, and Chinese EVs, backed by decades of tax breaks & cheap hydropower.
India is trying to create the demand and build the factory to meet it, domestically in the same decade.
Food for thought: If strong demand fills a factory this fast, what does it say about the pace at which Indian manufacturing can scale?
