Rush To Market Or Build In Haste? EV Startup Creatara Mobility At IIT-Delhi Holds Secret

Creatara Mobility is using an industrial grade laboratory at IIT-Delhi's Centre for Automotive Research and Tribology (CART) to run tests on electric scooter prototypes

In a small room at the Indian Institute of Technology's massive innovation centre in Delhi, a group of young engineers work quietly on separate desks, tinkering and fine-tuning sections of a new electric scooter that needs the expertise of different types of engineers. One is working on the functional qualities and aesthetics using a technical drawing software, another is staring at a circuit board using a magnifying glass. The rest are also busy - there's the chassis expert, the battery design expert, the software expert. All of them have only one goal - to build the safest electric scooter from scratch that's also fun to drive like a motorcycle.

But Creatara Mobility, a bootstrap venture started by two engineers, is nowhere on the map amid hard funding times made even more difficult by the pandemic.

"The biggest problem we are facing is not having enough funds as a startup. We are entering a capital-intensive business and we are building a complex product from scratch," Vikas Gupta, who co-founded Creatara Mobility with Ringlarei Pamei in 2018, told NDTV at their one-room company inside the massive IIT incubation centre. Both are alumnus of IIT-Delhi.

"We have no public relations. We are not making fancy noise. Only hard core research and development work is going on, and this is where the situation becomes difficult because it takes time to make a good electric scooter backed up by solid underpinnings like the safest battery to be used in Indian conditions," Mr Gupta said.