(From left) Narayan Subramaniam, co-founder and CEO, and Niraj Rajmohan, co-founder and CTO, Ultraviolette, with the company’s new electric scooter at their corporate office in Bengaluru
Image: Hemant Mishra for Forbes India
When one thinks of an electric high-performance motorcycle that’s ready for Europe, it’s unlikely that a small startup in Bengaluru will come to mind. But that’s exactly what Niraj Rajmohan and Narayan Subramaniam achieved last year with their F77, designed and developed at their Bengaluru startup Ultraviolette Automotive.
This year, on March 5, they surprised the home market with a more mass-market vehicle, an electric scooter. Named Tesseract, to signify that it’s also a power-packed product, the scooter reflects the same hallmarks of hi-tech features that elevate a rider’s experience, and safety, offered on the F77—traction controls, hill-hold function and regenerative braking, for example.
When they launched the scooter, Ultraviolette’s founders offered a ₹25,000 discount for the first 10,000 customers, on the list price of ₹1,45,000 for the entry-level variant. Bookings far exceeded even their optimistic expectations.
“We had set up the site so that each time there was a booking, Narayan and I, and a couple of others would get an email,” Subramaniam tells Forbes India. “We had a hard time dealing with the inbox with 20,000 emails in two days.”
This prompted the duo to extend the discount offer to the first 50,000 customers. And at the time of the Forbes India interview, 10 days into the scooter’s launch, bookings had crossed 40,000.
With increased consumer awareness about EVs (electric vehicles) in India, the two-wheeler market, especially, is ready for its inflection point. And with the Tesseract, “the design is there, the performance is there, and the features are there, and some features that have never been offered in a two-wheeler before”, claims Rajmohan.
This scooter is equipped with a front-facing radar that scans the way ahead and alerts the rider with haptic feedback on the handlebars. It has ‘omnisense’ rearview mirrors with integrated blind-spot alerts. The scooter also alerts the rider to vehicles approaching too close from the rear and a full-circle radar-based sensing system that keeps track of the two-wheeler’s surroundings.
On the performance front, the top variant, with a 6kWh battery, delivers a range of more than 260 km per charge. It delivers 20 hp of power, making the Tesseract “India’s most powerful scooter”, with corresponding torque and acceleration specs, Subramaniam claims. “Everything that we learnt from the R&D for the F77 over the last seven to eight years is now something we are able to offer in the mass-market scooter today.”
Customers are ready if one goes by just the response to Tesseract. “Clearly, within the scooter market, EVs are a strong consideration set, and the adoption rate has been picking up,” says Subramaniam.
Second, “we were clear that design, technology and performance have to come together to disrupt this market”, he says, echoing Rajmohan. They’ve not crimped on form and functionality either. The scooter has a strong stance, with 14-inch wheels and a storage capacity of 34 litres, which can accommodate a full-face helmet and a backpack. “And it can take on any terrain now” because of the big wheels.
Also read: Ultraviolette: Building a performance EV bike in India for the world
Subramaniam and Rajmohan started Ultraviolette in 2016. They’ve always said that aerospace has been an important part of their inspiration in design as well as performance. Their first showroom, therefore, was called Hangar, in Bengaluru. And today there are other showrooms called Space Stations. These past several months, they’ve expanded their presence to 15 cities in India.
In September 2024, the F77 was granted the homologation certifications in the EU (European Union), which allows them to sell the bike across that region. “We now have strong distributor partners across Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the UK, and we are proud to be taking Indian technology to first-world European markets,” Subramaniam says.
The scooter too will eventually be exported. “All our vehicles have been designed and developed for global certifications,” (meeting the UNECE norms) Rajmohan adds. Further, the EU certification allows Ultraviolette to sell the F77 in 40 countries now, including Japan, Australia and some Southeast Asian markets, and not just the 27 EU nations.
At home in India, much of the competition in electric scooters is in the mid and lower end today, Soumen Mandal, a senior analyst tracking the ecosystem for Internet of Things, automotive and telecom at Counterpoint Technology Market Research, tells Forbes India. Therefore, Ultraviolette’s scooter stands out, he says.
Ultraviolette is raising the bar with the Tesseract in terms of the combination of design, performance and hi-tech features on offer, Mandal says. During a visit to Ultraviolette’s R&D and production hub in Bengaluru in September, “I saw the type of build quality, and how they think about their products,” he says. “And a mass-market model will help them sell more and sustain their business.”
“They are also incorporating Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipsets that have automotive applications”, Mandal points out.
An important reason that companies such as Ultraviolette are on the cusp of breaking out is that the ecosystem has quietly matured. For example, today it’s possible for a startup EV maker to find a vendor locally capable of delivering common, but critical, components such as a copper bus bar, to not just mechanical specifications but also the needs of an EV. How much current is that bar expected to carry, and what can be the corresponding rise in temperature, and so on.
“For us, the consistency, the purity of the metal, all this matters, and now people in the ecosystem have started to learn and adapt to all this,” Rajmohan says. And the electronics manufacturing services offered by companies such as Foxconn or SFO Technologies or Sanmina Corp have penetrated deep enough into the Indian supply chain where an assembled printed circuit board, for example, can be ordered with confidence.
“They are like, everywhere, and that sort of completes the ecosystem,” Rajmohan says, while certain other requirements such as battery assembly still remain ‘specialised work’. And India still doesn’t have its own EV battery cell manufacturers, while some pilots are on. Similarly, a couple of other components such as the semiconductors in the vehicles and the magnets within the EV motors currently need to be imported.
The bottom line is, even smaller startups, and not just big automakers, can confidently commit to releasing products to a well-planned cadence. Along with the scooter, Ultraviolette also released a light motorcycle named Shockwave. The Tesseract is expected to be delivered to early buyers starting the first quarter of 2026.
Subramaniam and Rajmohan are in talks to fund a much bigger factory—capable of turning out 300,000 vehicles. They are also working on new products, including a long-distance cruiser motorcycle.