The motorcycles are no pushovers. Even at their introductory price of £8,499 in the UK, they will be the most expensive Indian two-wheeler export. They will sport fit, finish and safety standards exacting regulations in western European markets.

The specifications—like engine power, top speed and distance travelled per charge of battery (range)—are expected to be comparable to global competitors like Harley Davidson and Zero Motorcycles. However, when it goes on sale next month, European consumers will find the price tag to be significantly lower.

For Ultraviolette Automotive, a startup founded in 2015 by two engineering college batchmates, Narayan Subramaniam and Niraj Rajmohan, it would be the moment of reckoning. While its competitors decided to make mass market scooters, Ultraviolette chose the harder path— a street electric motorcycle, which in the automotive world is considered a hard engineering problem.

Many argued that it would be impossible to build a motorcycle with a large and heavy battery for long range; it could heat up at high speeds and compromise stability. But Ultraviolette managed to put it all together in its F77 model. The company has already sold 1,500 of them in India since its domestic launch in March 2023.

Mukul Ingle from Pune bought a F77 in February 2024 and rode 16,500 km on it thus far. “My Pune biking club has over 500 members riding mostly premium combustion engine motorcycles. My respect for the F77 is only growing. Most can’t believe that my motorcycle hasn’t had a glitch so far and that I have saved at least ₹50,000 in fuel costs,” he says.

In December 2024, another motorcycle under development, the F99, set a record for the fastest quarter mile and is also the fastest Indian motorcycle clocking a speed of 265 kmph. The records are certified by the Federation of Motor Sports Club of India. Then, in February this year, the company announced two new products—a scooter and an off-road motorcycle. With a special introductory offer of ₹120,000 (ex-showroom), the scooter, Tesseract, has already received 60,000 pre-bookings, while the off-roader, Shockwave, has 7,000 bookings.

“From a sheer engineering perspective, Ultraviolette has created a product that passes global muster. There isn’t such an example from India and that makes them an important automotive startup case study,” Vivekananda Hallekere, founder of Bengaluru-based electric scooter firm Bounce Infinity, says.

Ultraviolette’s bikes were initially sold in Bengaluru but has now expanded to 12 Indian cities. It is targeting 40 global markets. On the anvil are also bigger factories to make new products—Tesseract and Shockwave. Customer deliveries are expected to start during the March quarter of 2026.

The bigger challenges begin now.

“Clearly, Ultraviolette has put itself on a clock to grow bigger and not doing so isn’t an option now. Any delay in the delivery of the much sought after scooters won’t sit well for the fledgling brand and the business,” Deepak Rathore, founder of electric vehicle research firm Insight EV, says.

Early risers

After studying engineering in Bengaluru, Subramianiam branched off to specialize in vehicle design while Rajmohan studied management and worked in software firms like Yahoo and NetApp.

When they got back together in 2015, India’s electric two-wheeler business wasn’t anything to talk about. In the overall 16 million two-wheeler market, electric vehicles accounted for a mere 16,000. They were mostly Chinese imports that had lead acid batteries, which meant low power and poor range. There weren’t many startups in the sector either. Ather Energy was just two years old—Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain founded the company in 2013 to develop an electric scooter platform.

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It was early days for global bike makers, too. Back then, none of the Japanese giants, like Honda or Yamaha, had even announced prototypes for their electric models. And Harley Davidson unveiled its electric platform, Livewire, only in 2018. California-based Zero Motorcycles, considered the Tesla of electric motorcycles, unveiled its updated SR/F model, priced at £17,990, around the same time.

“All our competitive projects in college were about solving complex problems creatively. We, therefore, wanted to set ourselves a task that no one in India would ordinarily think of. Since Narayan (Subramaniam) was into racing, the idea of building a fast street motorcycle took shape,” says Rajmohan, now the chief technology officer (CTO) of Ultraviolette. “It was also the kind of project that kindled our passion.”

All of Ultraviolette’s current laurels rests on its motorcycle, the F77. Apart from being the costliest Indian made electric two wheeler on the road, it has the most range per single charge. Its battery, the most expensive component, also comes with an 800,000 kilometre warranty.

At its lowest price of ₹299,000, it is pricier than most Royal Enfield motorcycle models, the biggest maker of premium bikes in the country. The cheapest Royal Enfield, the 350cc motorcycle Hunter, starts at ₹149,000 (ex-showroom), going up to ₹368,000 (ex-showroom) for the Super Meteor 650.

Some buyers compare Ultraviolette’s F77 with higher priced international brands such as Aprilia 457 or a Kawasaki 400.

The fuel

As with many startups, raising money was difficult initially. “We met 200 investors to showcase our idea before we got our first investor,” says Subramaniam.

One early investor to bet on the company was Vishesh Rajaram, managing partner of Speciale Invest, who came in as an angel investor. Subsequently, the Chennai-based venture capital firm invested in the company in 2022.

“We didn’t invest in the company because they were making a street motorcycle but because they had enough ideas to create a design for a battery pack that could turn into powerful motorcycles,” says Rajaram. “We knew that was the problem to solve before the motorcycle idea even took shape.”

Shortly after Rajaram, two wheeler maker TVS Motor, which has several combustion engine racing models in its portfolio, invested ₹5 crore in the company in 2017.

Ultraviolette first unveiled a prototype of its street motorcycle in 2019, which led to another round of funding. TVS Motor and GoFrugal, a company promoted by SaaS player Zoho’s Kumar Vembu, participated. In August 2022, Ferrari’s biggest shareholder, Exor, invested $10 million in the company. In November 2024, Ultraviolette raised ₹130 crore in a fresh round of capital led by Zoho. Earlier this month, it said it was raising ₹32.6 crore from a new bunch of investors.

Overall, the startup has raised about $83 million.

The battery

The problem in making a viable electric motorcycle was that its battery had to be powerful enough to enable longer distances at high speed. Since power of the battery is directly proportional to size, it meant the battery pack on the motorcycle had to be large and therefore, heavy. That moved the centre of gravity of the overall motorcycle, making its handling very difficult.

Most electric two-wheelers today deliver around 2 to 4 kWh of energy (capacity) and 3 to 11 kW of peak power. “With the F77 Mach2, we had to scale that up to nearly 10 kWh and 30 kW of electrical power to match and exceed ICE performance. On the F99 racing platform, this went up to 100 kW. But the challenges aren’t linear,” says Rajmohan.

When energy capacity and power are scaled up, increases in thermal loads, current handling, and safety complexity are exponential. One of the biggest breakthroughs was in building a compact, high-density battery architecture that could handle these demands reliably, with tight integration of power electronics, control systems, and safety architecture, he adds.

One of the biggest breakthroughs was in building a compact, high-density battery architecture that could handle demands reliably, with tight integration of power electronics, control systems, and safety architecture.

The founder duo went about building things frugally.

Once the battery is built, the packs have to be tested on prototypes. The tests generate data on how the battery behaved in actual use conditions; how fast the battery discharged at high speeds versus low speed conditions.

The generated data is fed into a machine called the recycler, which simulates road conditions. The early problem for Ultraviolette was that the machine was available in Germany and cost $30,000. There was no way the startup was going to spend its seed money of about $390,000 for one such machine. Says Rajmohan: “It took us some time but we built a recycler for ₹3,00,000.”

Hiring the right people helped, too. In 2020, just before the pandemic struck, Ultraviolette had 40 employees. An important executive was Vinayak Bhat, who was picked for his experience in avionics design. Bhat, who is currently the chief product officer, has been the main architect behind designing the battery module and power train.

“Unlike combustion engines which take lots of time and capital to build, electric vehicle technology isn’t very difficult. For us, building the battery no one else would attempt was a kind of strategy moat,” Subramaniam says.

The final ready-to-ride version of the F77 became available in Bengaluru showrooms starting January 2023. The second showroom, in Pune, came up only 18 months later, forcing customers like Mukul Ingle to source from Bengaluru.

Unlike combustion engines, which take time and capital to build, electric vehicle technology isn’t very difficult.
—Narayan Subramaniam

In 2023-24, the company posted revenue of ₹15 crore and a net loss of ₹61.5 crore.

The big question

In many ways, Ultraviolette is where Ather Energy was five years ago. It has a great product and strong investors but needs money to scale up. The similarity ends there,” says a partner with a Singapore-based investment firm who didn’t want to be identified. “As the F77 is for a niche audience, and more expensive, scale up is going to be more difficult,” the executive added.

Though Ather was an early mover in the electric scooter business, later entrants like Bajaj Auto, TVS Motor and Ola Electric now sell more scooters. Ather also had to change its strategy, from selling a premium model to introducing cheaper versions for volumes.

The options before Ultraviolette, however, are limited. By increasing the points of sales and more marketing, it can hope to achieve bigger volumes. But the company may be running out on time—more competition is knocking at the door.

Zero Motorcycles has tied up with Hero MotoCorp to launch their electric motorcycle models in India. Bajaj Auto has said that it will bring its electric motorcycles soon, while Royal Enfield has unveiled its electric model, Flying Flea, at EICMA 2024, an international two-wheeler exhibition. It is expected to launch in the fourth quarter of 2025-26.

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Like we mentioned earlier, Ultraviolette has already accepted bookings for its scooter and has given itself about 12 months to deliver them. The company, therefore, would require more money to quickly put up a larger factory, staff it, and build the scooters.

Says Rathore of Insight EV: “Even if Ultraviolette wants to deliver just a few thousand scooters in the first year, it will have to go the distance to set up a larger factory as its current one in Bengaluru is not big enough.”

The Bengaluru plant has an annual capacity of 10,000 units per shift.

One possibility is TVS Motor bringing in more cash. The two-wheeler maker currently owns about 28% and classifies Ultraviolette as an associate company in its balance sheet. More funding could possibly result in a majority stake.

“The life of a startup, even if they have achieved what they set out to do, is not linear,” says Rajaram of Speciale Invest. “These are situations that happen on a daily basis and the promoters need to look for solutions. And every startup problem is always a tough one.”