The electrical car section is rising leaps and bounds each passing day, and the start-ups that entered the section early have now began reaping the advantages of being early betters. Mumbai-headquartered Ion Energy, start its journey in 2015, a time when many corporations had been mulling the potential of the electrical car section. Instead of leaping on the simple bandwagon, Akhil Aryan, co-founder, and CEO, Ion Energy determined to give attention to the BMS (Battery Management System) an space that was nonetheless in its infancy stage within the nation.
Fast forwardto May 2022, tier 1 provider Endurance Technologies acquired Maxwell EnergySystems (MESPL) a subsidiary of Ion Energy for $40 million (Rs 310 crore).
In a dialog with Financial Express, he reveals the ideas behind the transfer, plans for the longer term, and focuses on telematics as a brand new enterprise space.
The acquisition for a lot of might imply the top of the journey for Ion Energy’s unique administration, however actually, as Aryan says, “The entire team, all the engineers, including Alex and me, the co-founder, CEO, and CTO will continue to work on Maxwell. From a management standpoint, we are only strengthening the management by maybe hiring. Now with the additional resources, bringing in a new VP of product or bringing a CFO, or inducting a new VP of operations can further help us with supply chain operations. But the entire core team, including Alex and I, will continue with Maxwell moving forward.”
He says “not all acquisitions are the same. Some acquisitions are where a business has a well-oiled machine, and everything is working. You can sort of just buy the business and keep doing what they were doing. But in our case, we are building forward-looking technology. And so what’s very important for me, even as a company at Ion Energy is to retain our talent and to invest in our culture and environment, to showcase and set a new standard not only inside the company but really for the industry that acquisitions don’t need to end continuity, they don’t need to mean exit, they can become amplifying vehicles to really take your mission to the next level and that’s really what I want.”
At current, Ion Energy was primarily specializing in two- and three-wheeler EV purposes. But with Endurance’s backing Aryan believes that there’s a complete new set of prospects which have opened up.
India as an R&D hub
It is not any secret that relating to investing in R&D and new product developments, Indian corporations have historically lagged far behind their world counterparts. Aryan too appears to agree that one of many deterrents for a lot of organisations has been “because R&D has a certain amount of risk associated with it. If you invest in R&D, you don’t know if that will eventually make it to mass production and in turn mass adoption. There is some sort of risk associated with that.”
But alternatively, with higher dangers comes higher rewards. He says for a rustic like India, which has a mass shopper market, if the expertise/product/resolution may be deployed efficiently within the nation, one may also derisk the R&D to an incredible extent.
Sharing the main focus for Maxwell, he says from the preliminary days the concept was to “bridge the gap between the electronics and software engineers”. The nation already has entry to a few of the brightest minds globally, the necessity is to nurture them basically “taking the R&D risk on India instead of outsourcing that IP and then licensing it back, taking the responsibility of converting the talent into technology, into products and then export it from India. And I think that that’s really worked for us. And I would say that is probably the core of why we’ve been successful is because we’ve identified high-quality global talent in India, worked on technologies that we designed for the world, not just for India, and then invested heavily into customer support and technology adoption and integration into the market, which sort of has a cascading effect on adoption.”
New merchandise and focus areas
Ion Energy start its preliminary give attention to offering BMS options below the Maxwell Energy Systems subsidiary to the two- and three-wheeler section.
Aryan explains that the best way Ion Energy has been created is “essentially at the intersection of three core capabilities – sensing, estimation, and functionally safe actuation.”
It means all Ion Energy merchandise within the foreseeable future will use sensors to gather uncooked knowledge; then they’ll use proprietary algorithms to estimate values from that sensor, and third primarily based on that estimation they’ll take some motion in a functionally positioned method. Citing the instance of the BMS, he says that it senses the voltage of the cells, gives an estimate of the state of cost & well being after which it can take motion on, probably, for instance, deciding how a lot present it can enable to move to the motor or how a lot present it can enable the charger to get within the battery.
According to Aryan, the corporate will proceed its give attention to designing BMS for “practically the entire gamut of applications, right, from kick scooters, bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, three-wheelers, four-wheelers, buses, trucks, forklifts, industrial UPS, residential UPS, and so on. we’re already a market leader in the two and three-wheel space. We are now investing heavily in the four-wheel and high voltage spaces. And so that’s going to be an area of focus for us over the next couple of years.”
The subsequent product that Ion Energy is engaged on is telematics. “We believe that the world is not only going to move towards an all-electric but also a connected future. All modern electric vehicles are connected to the cloud. But as you do that from a data security and encryption standpoint, it becomes very important because if you have two-way communication, you can have a lot of breaches on security that can update software for these vehicles. And from a functional safety standpoint, apart from just battery, we believe that telematics has a lot of scope to add value not only on the hardware but on the embedded software and the safety encryption. So that’s the second product platform that we’re building that will be launching, I would say either end of this year or early next year.”
Despite being a younger start-up, it’s attention-grabbing to notice that the corporate is already working with near 70 to 75 clients, which is a mixture of OEM in addition to battery pack makers. The enterprise is break up about 50-50 between India and worldwide clients.
“We will probably be bringing on in the pipeline many high-value customers in India, some of the world’s largest OEMs – not just India’s largest OEM – will be going into production with us very shortly and that will mean that in the foreseeable future, the India business will continue to grow. But we still have an ongoing focus on European customers because like I said we have designed our products and technology for the world. And even today, for example, we have customers in more than 15 countries,” concludes an optimistic Aryan.
Source: www.financialexpress.com”