EV infrastructure start-up Exponent Energy has raised $5 million in pre-series A funding from YourNest VC, 3one4 Capital, AdvantEdge VC and Motherson Group, a global supplier of automotive components.

With this round, the company has raised a total of $6 million in funding till now. Exponent Energy has recently unveiled its battery pack and charging station called the E-pack and E-pump that together offers a 15-minute rapid charge for commercial vehicles and give a 3,000 cycle life warranty — all done on a range of Li-ion cells. This is made possible by their proprietary BMS and charging algorithms, layered on top of their unique E-pack design.

Commenting on the fundraise, Co-founder & CEO, Arun Vinayak said, “We’re excited to deepen our partnership with our existing investors who’ve watched us build from scratch. Motherson coming on board adds immense value to scale with respect to OEM relationships and manufacturing partnerships. Given the demand witnessed for our rapid charging technology in the logistics space, we prioritised closing the pre-series a to enter the market by early 2022.”

Fund deployment

The company will use the funds raised to begin commercial operations and scale it across multiple cities starting with Bengaluru from early 2022. It will also use the funds to hire across product and engineering teams along with doubling down on its software products to create a seamless customer experience. Currently, Exponent Energy has 27 people in-house and plans to hire 50-60 people across product and engineering teams to ensure its products enter production.

“We plan to expand our footprint phase-wise in a way that everytime we enter a city, we will look at deploying a city-wide charging network from Day 0 before Exponent-enabled vehicles are rolled out. Post Bengaluru, we plan to enter Delhi NCR,” Vinayak told BusinessLine .

“Motherson has been known as a pioneer in the auto component industry having scaled globally by partnering with leading OEMs. As the auto industry adopts EVs, we want to remain a key player and partnering with start-ups like Exponent gives us a head start to be able to build offerings that help us to continue to expand and achieve our broader vision,” said Laksh Vaaman Sehgal, Vice-Chairman, Motherson Group.