Electric motorcycle manufacturer Ather Energy has announced the raising of equity capital worth up to ₹1200 crore. These new funds come from existing investors, including Hero MotoCorp, the India-Japan Fund, and the company's founders.
Electric motorcycle manufacturer Ather Energy has announced the raising of equity capital worth up to ₹1200 crore. These new funds come from existing investors, including Hero MotoCorp, the India-Japan Fund, and the company's founders.
The Bengaluru-based company plans to issue shares worth approximately ₹200 crore to the India-Japan Fund, which is managed by the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF). Meanwhile, Hero MotoCorp is investing ₹960 crore through convertible warrants. Co-founders Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain are each contributing ₹20 crore via warrants.
The offer remains subject to shareholder and regulatory approval. This funding round is part of a broader plan approved by Ather's board of directors, which aims to raise up to ₹2500 crore. According to the company, this major capital project is intended to support production expansion, research and development, new product development, and general corporate needs.
Ather Energy was founded in 2013 by IIT Madras graduates, Mehta and Jain. The company develops electric scooters, battery technologies, charging infrastructure, and connected software. Its product portfolio includes the Series 450 and the family-oriented Rizta scooter, while the Ather Grid network provides fast charging across various Indian cities.
The company positions itself as a technology-driven player in electric mobility, integrating hardware with software features such as navigation, over-the-air updates, and connected vehicle services.
Under the preferential allotment, the India-Japan Fund will subscribe to 16.26 lakh shares worth nearly ₹200 crore. Hero MotoCorp will acquire 76.19 lakh convertible warrants valued at about ₹960 crore, and Mehta and Jain will subscribe to 1.59 lakh warrants, each valued at ₹20 crore. These warrants can be converted into shares within 18 months, with 25% of the subscription amount paid upfront and the remainder upon conversion.
This transaction strengthens the long-standing partnership between Ather and Hero MotoCorp, which is already the company's largest shareholder. After the full conversion of warrants, Hero's stake will increase slightly to approximately 30.7% on a fully diluted basis, while the India-Japan Fund's stake will rise to just over 6%.
The India-Japan Fund is a bilateral investment platform supported by the Government of India and the Government of Japan, with NIIF acting as the fund manager. The fund focuses on long-term investments in sectors such as infrastructure and manufacturing, making Ather's business in electric mobility strategically aligned with its investment strategy.
The fundraising comes amid growing competition in the Indian two-wheeler EV market. Manufacturers, including TVS Motor, Bajaj Auto, Ather Energy, and Ola Electric, are expanding their product lines and production capacities as electric scooters capture an increasing share of new two-wheeler sales.
Government support through initiatives like the PM E-Drive scheme, which provides demand incentives for relevant EVs, continues to stimulate adoption. However, manufacturers are increasingly focusing on scaling, localization, and profitability rather than solely on subsidies. Capital raising activity also remains high in the sector; for instance, Ola Electric recently raised about ₹780 crore through a qualified institutional placement. Ather's financing follows a year of rapid operational growth, which included sharp increases in sales volume, retail network expansion, and work on a new manufacturing facility in Maharashtra.
Mowito, a company specializing in physical artificial intelligence (AI) and creating foundational models for industrial robots, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $3 million in a seed funding round.
The round was led by Version One Ventures. Other participants included All In Capital, Unisol, iSeed, as well as angel investors such as Soumith Chintala (from Thinking Machines Lab), Adarsh Kulkarni (from Foundry Robotics), Ashish Kulkarni (from Coformer.ai), and Vaibhav Domkundwar (from Better Capital).
The company stated that the funds will be used to accelerate expansion in the United States, strengthen engineering and market teams, and scale deployments with manufacturers in the automotive and electronics industries.
Founded in 2024, Mowito develops physical AI models that allow industrial robots to learn directly from task demonstrations. This eliminates the need for traditional programming while maintaining the necessary precision for manufacturing processes.
The company serves global manufacturers in the automotive and electronics sectors, with headquarters in Bengaluru and Detroit. It was noted that Mowito robots are already being used on production lines of a major Fortune 500 automotive company and one of the world's largest electronics contract manufacturers, supporting high-precision assembly operations.
Co-founder and CEO of Mowito, Puru Rastog, emphasized that manufacturing has reached a point where the bottleneck is no longer hardware but software. He noted that robots should not require reprogramming when production changes, but should learn like humans—through observation and repetition. He added that this funding will help accelerate this concept, expand globally, and implement Physical AI in more manufacturing environments.
All In Capital Partner Kushal Bhagia expressed the view that manufacturing is entering a new phase where AI will radically change industrial automation. He highly praised Mowito, stating that the company is creating fundamental technology that removes one of the main barriers to industrial automation—the complexity of robot programming—and that the technical depth of the team, early customer validation, and vision for Physical AI place it in an exceptional position to define this category.
