India's Delivery Fleet To Be 30–40% Electric In Five Years, Says Zypp Electric CEO

The rapidly growing delivery fleets in India will see at least 30-40% penetration of electric vehicles by 2027, according to Akash Gupta, co-founder of shared mobility and delivery firm Zypp Electric.

“Penetration of electric vehicles in India's delivery fleets is currently at 1-2%, which should hit at least the 30-40% mark in the next four to five years as the e-commerce market grows,” Gupta, also the chief executive officer of EV-as-a-service platform, told BQ Prime. “We're looking to capture nearly half of that market.”

India's e-commerce market is poised to reach $50 billion in 2022, growing 25% year-on-year, according to a joint study by the consulting firm Bain & Company and Flipkart. This market is expected to scale to $150–$170 billion by 2027.

According to Gupta, this will mean that the market will need 70–80 lakh delivery executives by that time, up from 20 lakh now.

And that's where platforms like Zypp Electric will come in.

Zypp Electric provides electric vehicles for last-mile delivery to companies looking for eco-friendly delivery solutions. It counts Amazon, Swiggy, Zomato, Zepto, and Blinkit among its long list of clients, which includes several names from India's e-commerce space.

The Gurugram-based startup leases these vehicles from electric scooter manufacturers and gives them to delivery agents, who deliver products for the company's clients.

It has a fleet of 8,000 EVs currently, and it adds close to 800 to 1,000 scooters every month to the overall tally. The startup plans to deploy a total of 1.5 lakh vehicles in the next 24 to 30 months, covering the top 18 cities in the country.

For such a huge scale, the company plans to dilute a 17–18% stake in its Series B round to raise $25–30 million.

Gupta says the next round of funding will be in about 18 months from Series B, and those funds will be used to increase the fleet to 5 lakh vehicles.

The company has started a pilot project in strategic partnership with Taiwan's battery swapping company, Gogoro Inc., to reduce the downtime of its vehicles. Currently, 70% of the vehicles in its fleet depend on charging stations for recharging the scooter batteries, while 30% rely on battery swapping.

Battery swapping will lead to virtually no downtime as the drained battery pack will be replaced with a fully charged one in a few seconds, compared to the 2-3 hours it takes to charge these batteries.