HPCL-backed EV firm Magenta raises $22 Mn

Electric mobility solutions provider Magenta Mobility has raised $22 million in a Series A1 funding round from bp Ventures, the venture capital arm of energy conglomerate bp, and Morgan Stanley India Infrastructure-managed investment fund.

The Pune-based startup plans to use the capital for expanding its fleet across India as well as improving the technology. The company aims to expand its fleet to 4,000 three and four-wheel EVs from 750 over the next year.

As a part of this investment, bp's joint venture with Reliance Jio will be the exclusive EV charging partner for Magenta's fleet, the company said in a statement.

In May 2021, Magenta scooped up $15 million in Series A funding from Indian American cardiologist and philanthropist billionaire Dr Kiran Patel. Seed funded by HPCL and incubated by Shell, Magenta was founded by Maxson Lewis and Darryl Dias in 2017.

Magenta claims to have 750 electric vehicles operating in the last-mile delivery space across seven cities - Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Gurugram, Mysuru, and Noida. The company caters to Amazon, Flipkart and other organisations in e-commerce, and food and online delivery segments.

In September 2022, the company formally entered Delhi-NCR with a plan to deploy around 400 electric cargo vehicles in the Flipkart fleet in the region. In July last year, it also partnered with Amazon India to induct a fleet of electric vehicles, including two and four-wheeler electric vehicles for the company’s delivery partners in Hyderabad. 

While the company’s scale is likely to grow multifold in the fiscal year (FY23), Magenta registered a 3.9X growth in its operating scale to Rs 5.59 crore in FY22 as compared to Rs 1.43 crore in FY21. As per its financial statements, the company's losses also deepened by 5X to Rs 13.66 crore in FY22 from Rs 2.72 crore in FY21.