He could have joined Tesla. Instead, this Bengaluru techie quit Toyota and Volvo to build electric tractors for farmers

It started with a question nobody in the room could answer. A group of friends from Bengaluru, the kind who can debate filter coffee brewing techniques for an hour, had driven out to visit a farm. The family that hosted them grew crops the old way, on land that had been in their name for generations. At some point, one of them asked something almost embarrassingly simple: farm electricity in India is free, so why does every tractor in the country still run on diesel?

Nobody had a good answer. One of the visitors, an automotive engineer named Anoop Srikantaswamy, couldn't stop thinking about it on the drive back.

Also Read: This Kerala boy has built cardboard robots that do most household chores


That conversation eventually became Moonrider, a Bengaluru startup now trying to do for tractors what Tesla did for cars, except the roads here are muddy fields, not highways, and the customer isn't a tech enthusiast with disposable income. It's a farmer counting every rupee spent on diesel.

A CV Most Engineers Would Kill For

Srikantaswamy didn't stumble into this by accident. He trained as a mechanical engineer, sharpened his management chops at Cornell, and then spent over a decade inside some of the biggest names in the auto industry, starting at Toyota Kirloskar Motor, followed by more than nine years at Volvo Group where he worked on global vehicle programmes, a stint advising on electric mobility at Accenture, and finally a leadership role heading product development at Ola.

By any conventional measure, he had already made it. Global brands on the resume, a comfortable corporate ladder still ahead of him. In 2023, he walked away from all of it.

He wasn't alone. Ravi Kulkarni, a former colleague from his Volvo days, co-founded Moonrider with him. Together they picked a problem that most of the EV industry had quietly ignored: India sells more tractors than any nation on earth, yet almost none of them are electric.

Why Tractors Are a Harder Problem Than Cars

Building an electric tractor isn't just a smaller, muddier version of building an electric car. Tractors work in dust, heat and constant vibration for hours at a stretch, often far from any reliable power supply. A battery that overheats or degrades quickly is worse than useless to a farmer whose entire season depends on the machine running.

Moonrider's answer was to design the vehicle from the ground up rather than retrofit an existing tractor with a battery, as some rivals have done. The company built its own battery pack in-house, along with what it describes as the first oil-cooled, later refined into a refrigerated, thermal management system built specifically for tractors, a technology that has since been patented. The result, according to the company, is a machine that can run for six to seven hours on a single charge, with a full recharge taking around two and a half hours, or roughly 40 minutes using rapid charging.

Also Read: 'Booked flat in 2012, now possession in 2032': Millionaire Sabeer Bhatia shares homebuying ordeal in India

The tractors, sold in 27, 50 and 75 horsepower variants, also come with over-the-air software updates and app-based monitoring, features borrowed straight from the EV car playbook, plus groundwork for autonomous operation and platooning further down the line.

Perhaps the most striking detail is how fast the first working prototype came together, engineers reportedly took it from a blank sheet to a functioning machine in under 40 days, a pace that would be unusual even for a well-funded car company.

The Pitch That Won Over Investors

Moonrider's early fundraising didn't follow the typical Bengaluru startup script of cold-emailing venture capitalists. By the founders' own account, much of the initial money came through direct outreach and product demonstrations rather than a polished pitch deck. One investor is said to have driven the tractor himself during a visit and committed a substantial sum on the spot, convinced simply by how the machine performed.

That approach appears to have worked. The startup has since raised close to $8.4 million in total across a seed round and a Series A led by pi Ventures, with backing from names including Micelio, Singularity AMC and AdvantEdge Founders. It has also signed commitments for close to 6,000 tractor deliveries over the next three years, and deliveries to customers have already begun. Moonrider says its tractors can cut the cost of land preparation and related farming operations by a significant margin compared to diesel machines, and its work recently earned it a Jury Choice honour at the India Tractor of the Year awards.

A Different Kind of Innovation Story

Bengaluru has no shortage of engineers who left big jobs to build electric scooters, electric cars or EV charging networks. Srikantaswamy went the other way, toward a market that rarely makes it into startup pitch decks despite touching the livelihood of hundreds of millions of Indians.

Also Read: Corporate Life vs Influencer Life: Bengaluru women compare salary, lifestyle, perks and freedom

His bet is a quiet one: that the next major shift in Indian mobility won't happen on an expressway showroom floor, but on a farm, where a machine that used to run on diesel might soon run on nothing but the free electricity that started this whole story in the first place.

(Source: TOI)