A Japanese Bike Maker And An Indian Startup Partner To Launch An Electric Scooter

Drivezy, a Bengaluru-based vehicle rental company and one its investors Yamaha Motor Co are partnering to launch Yamah’s high-end electric scooter — the EC-05 — in India.

The EC-05 was launched recently in Taiwan and could reportedly be available in India as early as November.

Launched in June, the EC-05 is borne of collaboration between Yamaha and Taiwan’s Gogoro Inc, a company that has built its own electric scooter as well as a network of charging stations. Designed by Yamaha, the EC-05 is built using Gogoro’s production vehicle platform.

The futuristic scooter relies on a network of 1,300 battery-swapping stations called GoStations in Taiwan. It’s not clear if Drivezy will replicate them in India.

“We are setting up a separate electrics subsidiary and will raise about $20 Mn to $25 Mn for it,” Drivezy CEO Ashwarya Pratap Singh had told Forbes India. With real estate being prohibitively expensive in Indian metros, Drivezy  maybe looking to innovate by way of partnerships with companies to share real estate.

Drivezy was founded in 2015 by Ashwarya Pratap Singh, Hemant Kumar Sah, Vasant Verma, Abhishek Mahajan, and Amit Sahu. Drivezy offers peer-to-peer bike and car sharing service. Currently, Drivezy is present in 11 cities with a fleet of  4,000 cars and 15K scooters.

The platform allows individual vehicle owners to list their idle cars, motorcycles and scooters and earn money by renting the vehicles to customers. Customers can rent a car or a two-wheeler from Drivezy for hourly, daily, weekly and monthly basis.

SoftBank and ecommerce giant Amazon are reportedly in talks to lead a $100 Mn (INR 690 Cr) equity financing round in Bengaluru-based vehicle-sharing marketplace Drivezy.

Drivezy has been on the lookout for fresh funds to expand its fleet across the country and also foray into the foreign markets.

Currently, it competes with other taxi aggregators and ridesharing startups like Ola, Uber, Bounce, LetsRide, PoolCircle, ZoomCar, Carzonrent, Wunder, and Ryde among others.

Drivezy was part of the 2018 edition of the most coveted list of India’s most innovative startups — 42Next by Inc42.