I don’t know how many of you heard about this company, The first time heard of them was 6-7 years ago. EVs were most talked about thing back then, it still is, but the Aluminum-Air battery, this was new term to me. The people from Hindustan times did an interview with their founder, Akshay.

Aluminum air battery

The idea was simple, the battery was made of Aluminum plates/wafers with Graphene and Air and pure water. Pardon my technical language, so essentially these are the ingredients function as a closed loop ecosystem. You create a reaction between Aluminum and Air with Pure water and it generates energy to run the vehicle and produces powdered Aluminum that can be recycled. The car was working. I could see that. I don’t know what went wrong. The amount of interviews they did, oh man, I was pumped about the future of affordable technologies for India.

Cigarette filter

Umm…. Why?
With all the possibilities of graphene, the best product to become face of the business is a cigarette filter?

CoronaOven

It was nice of them to make it. This was a good PR at the time of COVID. They built this UV thing to disinfect Groceries, masks etc. But again, this was never their niche or related to their business. I guess, science kids after all, so chalta.

LTO Battery

Back to batteries.

Millions of investments later, finally a product that they can say, we sell them.

For a lot of time this was masqueraded as a new innovative technology and they were the market leader. LTO technology has been around for a while. There is a reason it never tookoff. They are lower dense Lithium versions out there, makes them bulky for EVs. China was a market leader for these cells, and IndiaMART sellers list used batteries.

Beauty of these cells, they charge super quick and can handle temperatures from -30 to +50 degree Celsius. But man as I said they are heavy and costly per wattage sense. Since these can last decades they are worth it for power storage solutions.

That’s their vertical of selling batteries to E-commerce two sellers short lived. The vehicles are basically carrying the batteries not the delivery goods. And the range sucks, sure charges faster.

All in all, I had high expectations from the company, but changing your customer base is not the best way to run a business. First EV batteries for 4-wheeler OEMs, then Smokers, aam janata during COVID, then EVs to E-commerce fleet.

I hope they come up with a product that people would be willing to pay. Upgrade of something old over a revolutionary new product. Now that they left the business, I wish them all the best.