On a typical day in any Indian metro, you can’t help being witness to the startling acrobatics of uniformed bikers snaking through the maze of traffic. Orange, red, violet, yellow – the shades of their uniforms tell us how 10-minute delivery has powered India’s 10 Mn-strong gig economy.

As quick commerce scoots into India’s fast-paced life, green vehicles – EVs, to be precise – run into the fast lane and the battery evolves from a mere commodity to a critical element for the momentum to sustain. Battery-as-a-Service (BaaS) has become a $2.74 Bn disruptor, poised to create a $5.60 Bn market in the next five years, for the logistics space as time and cost seem precious like never before.

BaaS is not just about recharging the battery. As time becomes indispensable in this plug-and-play era, battery swapping has come into play for both two-wheeler (2W) and three-wheeler (3W) EVs. It takes 3-5 hours to recharge a drained battery, while swapping it with a fully charged one takes just a few minutes.

“It’s a smarter way of saving on both time and cost,” said Pulkit Khurana, whose Battery Smart has been an early bird to catch the worm. “Seven out of 10 battery swaps across India’s 2W and 3W commercial EVs are being done by us,” he told Inc42.

Khurana and his fellow IIT Kanpur alumnus Siddharth Sikka set up Battery Smart in Gurugram in 2019 – long before the whiffs of a potential market reached a corporate giant like Reliance. In these five years, Battery Smart has raised more than $130 Mn in funding that includes a $65 Mn Series B raise in May 2024, led by investors like MUFG Bank, Panasonic, Ecosystem Integrity Fund, Blume Ventures, and British International Investment.

Inc42 exclusively reported that Battery Smart has just raised an additional $29 Mn in an extended Series B round, led by New York-based private equity firm Rising Tide Energy and other investors.

The company has not yet utilised the capital it raised last year and aims for strategic expansion of battery swapping stations in areas where the demand is high. As of March 2025, it expanded to 41 cities with over 1,500 swapping stations.

By the end of May, it plans to reach out to more than 50 cities across Tiers I, II, and III, leveraging a partner-led model where local businesses like mom-and-pop stores can operate the swapping stations from a 150–200 Sq Ft area, said the founder. The startup supplies the batteries to local stores, provides them with training modules, and offers them a commission in return.

It’s two-way traffic. While Battery Smart showed a smarter way to make the best use of EVs, the rise in EV sales, in turn, stoked the need for battery swapping facilities as India matured to the age of quick commerce.

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