Tarun Mehta had received a probation letter at work. Instead of waiting for the next one, he left the office and went to the IIT Madras campus, where his old hostel friend Swapnil Jain was waiting. That was the real start of Ather Energy.
Mehta grew up in Ahmedabad in a Marwari family. His father ran a one-man computer business, assembling PCs and selling antivirus and tax software, and Tarun tested the machines by playing games on them: Age of Empires, SimCity, tycoon games. He refused tuitions until Class 10 and took exactly one JEE class, two hours every other day, mainly because the cycle ride was short. He still made IIT Madras, where he picked the new engineering design department. He was nervous about electronics and disliked coding, so he took the mechanical path.
He refused tuitions until Class 10 and took exactly one JEE class, two hours every other day, mainly because the cycle ride was short.
In the hostel, his room sat directly under Swapnil's. They spent about five years building things together. Swapnil had made a Stirling engine in his second year, and the two kept at it for roughly three years after college without reaching production. Mehta started looking for jobs, and Swapnil took one at General Motors. The pull of the old project did not fade. Over weekends he took trips to Bangalore to pitch Swapnil on coming back, and on Friday nights he slept in a department room at IIT.
They quit and began on batteries and chargers, with a mock scooter. Customers, they discovered, wanted the scooter, not the battery. Mehta has since said the ₹5 lakh incubation grant was all the capital he thought they would need, and that he underestimated the costs. The first real cheque, ₹25 lakh, came from Dr V Srinivasan because Mehta was the only founder who turned up to meet him. Flipkart's Sachin and Binny Bansal put in $1M in December 2014 and Tiger Global followed with $12M. Hero MotoCorp became the anchor investor from 2016.
The product took years. The S340 was unveiled in 2016, the 450 series came in 2020, and a plant in Hosur started operating in January 2021. In 2019 Mehta raised the price to about ₹1.65 lakh, which he calls his biggest risk. Sales rose afterward.
In May 2025 Ather listed on the NSE and BSE, and Mehta has named the listing ceremony his proudest moment. In Q2 FY26 it beat Ola Electric in quarterly revenue, with about ₹899 Cr and a net loss narrowing to ₹154 Cr, though the stock fell back after lock-ins expired.
The lesson is small and practical. Ather did not begin with a grand plan; it began with two friends who kept building, and with one founder who admitted that he tends to jump while his partner remembers everything.