[The Turning Point] How a family car led to the idea of deep tech startup ION Energy – YourStory

Akhil Aryan, the Co-founder of ION Energy, was interested in the physics of energy and software since he was a young boy. He was managing product and growth at Haptik as CPO in 2015. This was the time when there was a lot of hype surrounding Tesla Model S, which had just come out.

So instead of selling the car, he suggested his father let him convert it into an electric car. He started reading books on how to convert an internal combustion engine into an electric one, and bought components online.

Co-founder ION Energy, Akhil Aryan

As he read up more on batteries, he understood that the battery is the most expensive and complicated component of an EV and if you solve that problem and make the battery accessible in a way that it lasts longer or performs better, then you can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership of the vehicle even though the upfront costs might be similar.

This is when Akhil decided to go deeper into the battery management space and realised that nobody at the time was doing it in India.

Thus, in 2016, he started ION Energy in Mumbai. ION is a deep technology platform to optimise battery performance and life-extension for the new era of electric vehicles, energy storage, and connected devices. The startup supplies its product to companies that are building EVs and energy storage systems for renewable energy.

In 2017, ION acquired Freemens SAS, an eight-year-old French company that is building battery management systems. Today, ION has offices in India and France.

Alexandre Collet, who was the founder of Freemens SAS, joined ION as the co-founder in 2017. Today ION has a total team strength of 53 people.

Akhil considers his startup journey as unusual.

The startup today has operations in 12 countries, the biggest markets being India, France, Germany, and the UK.

ION has raised over $1 million in three transactions from Tessellate Ventures and other undisclosed investors.

Talking about the future, Akhil says,

The startup is focused on continued investments in product innovation. We want to build a deep link between hardware and software so that we can continue to innovate software to improve the quality of our hardware and build partnership with period OEM that can be built over time as the market matures, he adds.

(Edited by Evelyn Ratnakumar)

Read more from the original source:

[The Turning Point] How a family car led to the idea of deep tech startup ION Energy - YourStory