Ather & Ola Electric: A tale of two contrasting rides

Mumbai: Hero MotoCorp can't have enough of Ather Energy. It bought stakes in the e-scooter maker twice in two months, at a stock price nearly six times that when the company listed in May 2025. If the investment by the two-wheeler market leader underscores its confidence in Ather's prospects and is a validation of its business model, the other prominent pure-play electric two-wheeler maker has had a different journey.

Ola Electric's shares are trading around half their August 2024 IPO price. It had private investors like SoftBank, Tiger Global and Temasek on its cap table before the IPO. These investors have exited or diluted their stakes, and now hold a combined shareholding of roughly 1%.

Also Read: EV maker Ather Energy nearly doubles revenues, cuts losses by 71%


The stock prices and investor behaviour reflect their performance in the underlying market.

Based on vehicle registration data from the government's Vahan portal, Ather's average monthly sales rose to around 29,000 units in the first five months of this fiscal from 18,400 in the first half of fiscal 2026. Ola Electric's numbers, meanwhile, fell to about 13,800 units on average from 18,000-a sharp downturn for a company that sold 33,974 units a month at its peak in 2024.

The two Bengaluru-based companies exhibit the troubles startups face and how product development, design, commitment and management strategy-plus a stroke of luck-differentiate success from struggle, industry experts say.

"Ather has the right design and engineering ethos, spending ample time and effort on the development of any product," said Deepesh Rathore, founder and head of research at Insight EV.

That product-led approach is showing up in the numbers. Ather's revenue from operations in the quarter through June rose 89% to ₹1,216.9 crore from a year earlier, with market share rising to 16.8% from 14.2%. For Ather cofounder and chief executive Tarun Mehta, capturing consumer imagination and trust is crucial to the success of a product. "The real thing that electric opens up is an opportunity to upgrade a customer's experience," he told ET.

Also Read: Ola Electric approves Rs 1,500 crore fundraise; COO Hyun Shik Park quits

The US-Iran conflict and resulting oil-price spike gave further push to the shift to electric, he said. Ola Electric Mobility cofounder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal did not respond to an email seeking comment until press time on Wednesday. Speaking at the company's June-quarter investor call, Aggarwal acknowledged that the brand took a hit.

"There are questions about whether the brand weakened over the last few quarters. It did," he said. But "dealers also see the resurgence", he added, pointing to a sales uptick between the March and June quarters. Its shares have also partly recovered from their all-time low in March.

According to Rathore, Ola often rushed products to market, reacting to competitive pressure or public-market expectations. "This means products that have not been validated properly or still have problems end up with customers," he said.

Dilemma Days

In 2020, Ather founders Mehta and Swapnil Jain debated whether to sell the company's IP, pivot to software, or shut down.

Mehta said he never bought into the idea that electric two-wheelers would be winner-takes-all.

"That only applies in industries where a disruptive event is followed up by a winner's take-off, which often happens in internet-enabled businesses."

The company is now preparing for its next growth phase with the Konarc, its first scooter with a metal body-a bid to win conservative, family-oriented buyers who equate metal build with durability, unlike the composite panels that tech-first startups favoured. Ather is also expanding capacity: a new Maharashtra plant, set to start production early next year, will more than double its current capacity of 35,000 units a month.

Ola Electric, meanwhile, has been hit by multiple snags. Its S1 series faced complaints of repair delays, spare parts shortages, software failures and poor communication-consumer complaints topped 10,000 between September 2023 and August 2024, as per Policy Research Action Network. Consumer commissions in Kerala, Thane, Dakshina Kannada and Telangana ordered refunds of ₹89,999 to ₹1.64 lakh plus compensation this year, citing service deficiencies.

Amid these challenges, its share in the electric two-wheeler market collapsed to 7% this August from a peak of 50% in 2023.

Near-Death Experience

When Ather launched its first scooters in 2018, it engineered an electric scooter from scratch rather than retrofit a petrol one-slower and costlier, but deliberate. The Ather 340 and 450 retailed at about ₹1.1 lakh and ₹1.25 lakh.

"The bill of materials alone cost ₹3.6 lakh," said Mehta, recounting the moment Jain and he first grasped the gulf between the cost and the sale price. "There was a lot of confusion and chaos, and we went through a near-death experience. We were dying and it gave us lot of clarity," he said.

Three years later, Ola Electric made a high-voltage launch of the S1 on Independence Day in 2021. Priced ₹99,999-1,29,999 after the FAME-II subsidy, the company pitched it as India's "Tesla on two wheels". Aggarwal called it "the best scooter ever made".

Ather's was hardly an obvious recipe for scale while Ola's bookings soared. But its vision caught the eye of Pawan Munjal of Hero MotoCorp, who invested ₹205 crore for a near-30% stake as early as October 2016-the start of what the two-wheeler market leader's CEO, Harshavardhan Chitale, describes as consistent backing through multiple rounds, including a ₹960 crore preferential allotment and a ₹1,758 crore share purchase from existing investors.

Chitale said the investment "reflects our strong conviction in the long-term potential of electric mobility in India" and the company's ambition to lead in sustainable mobility. As the leader of the two-wheeler market, he said, it was important for Hero MotoCorp to "participate meaningfully" in the opportunity and help accelerate EV adoption.

Hero MotoCorp has continued to invest in Ather even as it makes its own electric scooter under the VIDA brand. Chitale called it a deliberate dual-brand strategy. The two brands now share a nearly 6,000-charger network, the industry's largest.

Premium Play

Mehta and Jain chose to compete at the premium end rather than on price. "We always said that we will never launch a scooter below a price tag of ₹1 lakh. We never did," Mehta said.

Ola, by contrast, compressed years of EV adoption into months. While it received unprecedented pre-bookings when the S1 series was launched in 2021, Ather was still building out distribution and selling modest volumes.

The positions have since reversed-visible in valuations, too. Ola Electric was valued under ₹17,500 crore based on Wednesday's stock price; Ather's market value is more than thrice at ₹62,500 crore.

"Ather has outperformed Ola across nearly all key metrics, including revenue, volumes, market share and loss management," said Sagar Shetty, research analyst at StoxBox. "What has weighed on Ola is the lack of consistency across these parameters, along with weaker-than-expected earnings growth."

(With inputs from Kairavi Lukka)