Founded in 2019, Statiq has emerged as the second biggest company in India"s electric vehicle (EV) charging market. With over 8000 electric chargers" network on its App, it has 22 percent of the market share in the EV charging space. India has over four million electric vehicles on its roads. Annual EV sales in FY24 crossed 1.7 million units, with a 40.31 percent year-on-year (y-o-y) growth. India"s annual EV sales are expected to reach 10 million by 2030. Statiq is preparing to lead the charging industry as India"s EV market expands. The Gurugram-based startup was co-founded by two friends, Akshit Bansal (who is also the CEO), and Raghav Arora (who is also the CTO). Before Statiq, the duo had co-founded another startup called Sharify, which worked as a vehicle-renting platform for individual owners. From 2018 to 2019, they worked on scaling Sharify without raising capital. However, the biggest challenge in scaling it up was not money, but regulations. In India, you cannot rent personal vehicles. They need to be registered as commercial vehicles for leasing purposes. Before starting their entrepreneurial journey, Bansal was in a risk advisory role in Deloitte, while Arora was a data scientist at Wipro. Bansal says that the two of them had no experience in running a business, building a team and product. “When we left our jobs and started working, the expectation we had was not to succeed at one time. We thought that it might happen, it might not happen, and maybe it will take a very long time. That’s why it didn’t feel or hurt a lot, and we continued," he says. By the time Sharify shut down, the co-founders were prepared for their next venture. Arora mentions how small things like setting up their first Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, building a website and user interface, and search engine optimisation (SEO) skills came in handy while building Statiq. “We did not have to re-engineer the process of making something. Of course, we had to make something from scratch, but we knew how to set this up and choose the right programming languages because we were already using niche programming languages. That helped, in addition to all the scaling, growth, and customer acquisition that we learned," he says. In 2019, EVs were the talk of the town. That year, 1,66,822 EVs were sold in India, as per the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways . While automobile companies were planning their EV transition and EV sale reached new heights, a charging infrastructure was needed to support this growth. Bansal and Arora saw an opportunity and started Statiq in October 2019 to build their own EV charging infrastructure as well as an aggregator platform for other Charging Point Operators (CPOs). They designed their EV charger in-house, and their manufacturing responsibilities were given to their Manesar-based Original Equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Further, they partnered up with existing CPOs, such as Bharat Petroleum and ChargeMod, to onboard their charging stations on Statiq’s network.
“Given his (Raghav’s) expertise was software and my expertise was hardware, we divided our work. I started working on the hardware, and he started working on the software part." Bansal recalls the early days of product development at Statiq. Bansal, having a bachelor"s degree in electrical engineering, headed the team responsible for designing the chargers, while Raghav, a software engineer, supervised the design and development of the Statiq App.