Ultraviolette Changes Its Premium Pitch; Will It Accelerate Sales?

“It’s time for us to say: ‘let’s unsubscribe to the construct of labels’,” Ultraviolette cofounder and CEO Narayan Subramaniam exclaimed at the recent launch of the company’s latest motorbike, the X-47 Crossover. 

The electric vehicle startup that had set out to reimagine high-performance bikes in India has just dropped its fourth model in nine months. 

Priced at INR 2.74 Lakh (ex-showroom, Bengaluru), the X-47 Crossover sits below the company’s flagship F77 lineup and is pitched as a hybrid between an adventure bike and a street naked. 

For CEO Subramaniam, it’s an attempt by the company to break away from rigid categories. But behind this marketing push perhaps lies a bigger factor: Ultraviolette’s growing urgency to widen its market share. 

The company is looking to diversify its product range, even if the underlying vehicle platform is the same. As evident in the launch of two new vehicles in March 2025 — an electric scooter, Tesseract, and a light-weight off-roading bike, Shockwave.

The latest bike, the X-47, closely mirrors these models on paper, except for a slightly lower top speed of 145 km per hour, improved acceleration, and a higher ground clearance designed for off-road and mountain riders.

The launch follows the EV startup’s $21 Mn fundraise led by Japan’s TDK Ventures in August, when the company claimed it would be investing in product portfolio expansion and widening the retail footprint.

Ultraviolette cofounder Niraj Rajmohan told Inc42 at the time that the company plans to grow its domestic presence in India from 20 cities to 40-50 cities by October 2025 and 100 cities by March 2026. 

This is a much-needed step for Ultraviolette to boost its market share even in the nascent electric motorbikes market. The company has struggled to meet its claimed sales targets and even as late as August 2025, it had only sold 138 vehicles as per official Vahan data. 

The Indian two-wheeler EV market has grown by more than 30% year-on-year (YoY) between 2022 and 2024. Yet, Ultraviolette’s sales figures remain weak.

Monthly sales have not even doubled since January 2025, and electric motorcycle makers such as Oben and Revolt have definitely outpaced Ultraviolette. Does this mean India is simply not ready for electric motorcycles yet, or is Ultraviolette stumbling in execution?

And if so, why exactly has the EV startup, which promised to redefine motorbikes for the electric age, struggled to show any momentum? 

Not So Fast Sales

It was September 2023; Ultraviolette was brimming with confidence that its high performance EVs would seize the country’s attention by virtue of the superior design and technology. 

In a conversation with Inc42 two years ago, Ultraviolette founders were confident that the company would have at least 1,000 motorcycles on the road by the end of 2023.

At the time, Vahan data showed fewer than 200 units registered in total, but the company insisted the bookings for its flagship F77 motorbike were rising. It also claimed that the Vahan portal did not account for vehicles that are booked but not registered, and it did not count EVs sold in some states. 

Despite this defence and the optimism, the ride has been anything but smooth. 

Not only did Ultraviolette miss that target for 2023, it wasn’t until nearly one year later that it crossed the 1,000 units sold mark. This came after it launched an upgraded model, the F77 Mach 2 in April 2024. 

Even in November 2024, CEO Subramaniam told a publication that the company was aiming for monthly sales of 1,000 units within the next six to eight months. But the reality pales in comparison.

After struggling for months with EV registrations stuck below 80 (as per Vahan), Ultraviolette’s registrations started climbing past 90 from April, breaching 100 units in July and August. Even if there are certain gaps between real sales volume and vehicle registrations, this is a stark gap between the claims and the data. 

Vahan data shows that it has so far registered 1,392 EVs as of August 2025, while the company claims to have sold around 3,000 vehicles in India in total. 

Ultraviolette did not respond to questions about this data mismatch and why the company has struggled to build sales momentum. But what about the fundamentals? Does a high-performance EV bring in better margins for the company?

Optimism Does Not Match Numbers

In actuality, the financial disclosures made by Ultraviolette actually contradict its own statements.

The startup posted an operating revenue of INR 15 Cr in FY24, a jump from INR 8.7 Cr in FY23. This includes its vehicle sales and sales of other merchandise goods. 

The total sales value of manufactured goods stood at INR 13.3 Cr in FY24. At an average price of INR 3 Lakh, Ultraviolette is expected to have sold less than 40 vehicles per month on average. 

And this matches Vahan data —  its registration volume ranged anywhere between 44 to as low as nine units during the fiscal year. Meanwhile, the company is relentless in announcing higher booking volumes every month. 

It claimed that its escooter Tesseract garnered 60,000 bookings within three months of orders being opened up. Similarly, Ultraviolette had said more than 10,000 customers had made bookings for Shockwave. 

Whether these claims hold any water will only become clear next year when deliveries begin. The true sales figures, as counted by Indian authorities, will only be out in the open by mid-2026. 

Unsurprisingly, Ultraviolette is now trying to play a diversification game, which also includes tweaking the price points. Besides, given that the company sells vehicles at a higher price point compared to other EV players, it justifies its presence in European markets.

“Premium bikes are a hard bargain in India. Even though Ultraviolette advertises its vehicle costs to be INR 2.99 Lakhs, the actual on-road prices range anywhere between INR 4 Lakh to INR 5 Lakh. And only around 5,000 two-wheelers above the INR 3.5 Lakh price are sold in India each year. Undoubtedly, the company had to face this difficulty in scaling,” said the founder of another electric two-wheeler startup, requesting anonymity, citing direct competition with Ultraviolette.

So, for the first time, Ultraviolette launched its Shockwave bike under the INR 2 Lakh price range. At an ex-showroom price of INR 1.75 Lakh, the vehicle also enjoys an INR 5,000 subsidy under the government’s EMPS scheme.

Even its latest X-47 Crossover is priced lower than F77 with almost similar specifications and more advanced engineering. Is Ultraviolette moving closer to the Indian competition and relinquishing some of its premium positioning? 

Can Ultraviolette Rev Up?

As stated, Ultraviolette did not respond to Inc42’s questions on the various issues and challenges in scaling up and growth. But industry experts unanimously believe that the biggest bottleneck is pricing.

Tanvir Singh, serial EV entrepreneur and founder of TrusTerra, pointed out that the preference for a motorcycle like a Splendour or any 150 CC bike in the Indian market is huge, and the majority of motorcycles that are being sold in the country are in rural areas and tier two and three cities. “First, EV penetration is low in these areas, and second, the user needs and mindset are different compared to scooter users,” he added.

Singh also claimed there are better ICE options available compared to EVs at an affordable range. “Now, in electric, you can’t trade off the experience of driving, torque, and range of an ICE motorcycle at a lower price. So, Ultraviolette’s price makes sense, but in India, that’s a niche market.”

Plus, there’s the fact that affordable and lighter electric scooters and two-wheelers have more mass adoption due to their utility in last-mile commuting, short daily rides and gig economy. 

“The gig-economy does not have the same anxieties of charging, life, resale and servicing as an individual customer of an electric two-wheeler will. As the gig economy uses electric scooters and not motorcycles, the number of the former far outstrips the latter as of now. And why is this? Because it is easier to design an electric scooter, given its layout, than a motorcycle.” Avik Chattopadhyay, an auto expert and founder of the Indian School for Design of Automobiles, added.  

In the electric motorcycle segment, though the adoption has been less compared to scooters, the likes of Revolt and Oben Electric have been able to penetrate the market to a greater extent, as shown in the data above. And the answer, once again, lies in affordability more than technology or design.

“I think, the requirements of giving the same kind of a performance which is comparable to petrol motorcycles and ensuring a price point reduction in that, is going to take at least two years,” said TrusTerra’s Singh.

The R&D And Scooter Play

Ultraviolette’s electric scooter foray will be a key part of the roadmap ahead. 

Multiple industry leaders, however, have pointed out that they continue to import completely knocked down (CKD) parts from other countries and assemble and sell in India, while Ultraviolette builds almost everything in India with some components imported.

This is similar to the dynamics between Ather Energy and Ola Electric. Without pointing at any OEM, Chattopadhyay said that the depth of R&D always has a direct effect on both production timelines and costs. “The deeper you go, the longer you take. Those who wish a more sustainable and differentiated approach will certainly take longer,” he added.

Having raised around $90 Mn in funding from the likes of Zoho, TVS Motors, Qualcomm Ventures and Speciale Invest, Ultraviolette has focussed heavily on tech and R&D. The launch of its radar-based rider assistance tech UV HyperSense along with the X47 bikes is a testament to that. 

This makes Ultraviolette the first Indian OEM to bring a rider assistance system for two-wheelers. Despite its partnership with Bosch for some other components, the startup decided to build this system in-house instead of using the one Bosch offers.

But this is a long-term investment and not all companies have the wherewithal to get there. Indeed, Ahmedabad-based Matter, which also boasts a strong R&D effort, has also failed to scale rapidly. Similarly, Bengaluru-based startup Orxa Energies could not deploy its vehicles on the road and has shut down its manufacturing facility.

Dinesh Arjun, who has founded Raptee Energy and is also working towards launching its first motorcycles on Indian roads, said, “Irrespective of whether you are building your own tech, buying tech and playing a vehicle integrator role, or, just getting CKDs and assembling them, irrespective of how we are doing it, it is a very tough business.” 

Plus, as Arjun and others reiterated, battling the dominance of TVS and Bajaj is not easy. Even in the electric scooter segment, Ola Electric has slipped behind the legacy players. 

As of now, it remains to be seen how far Ultraviolette can keep delivering on its old promises and new vision. While new launches are a welcome move, we cannot escape the fact the competition is now steeper for the company 

More than ever the company has to balance cost, performance, and competitive edge — just a pitch about breaking labels and cooler designs will not be enough.

Edited By Nikhil Subramaniam