Pixy Electric is growing in its chosen niches

Rajeev Ranadive has spent his entire professional career learning what customers want in a vehicle, and more importantly, what customers will pay for in a vehicle. He could be considered a technologist. Or an automotive expert. But prefers to be known as a businessman.

By extension, his startup, Pixy Electric Cars is an automotive technology company, with an emphasis on business. Ranadive and his small team of technical experts and engineers work in the emerging space of vehicle conversion - converting vehicles with internal combustion engines (ICE) to electric vehicles, through the retrofitting of a proprietary powertrain technology.

Ranadive began his career at Greaves Cotton, where his job was integrating an engine into everything from a two-wheeler to a battle tank. While his time as an engineer gave him a good sense of the nuts and bolts of the technology, it was the many years after that as Head of After Sales (first at Mahindra and Mahindra, and then at General Motors) that gave him the real insights on what drives customer adoption. “You only really get to know the customer in after-sales service.”

It was these learnings that guided Ranadive many years later when he began to explore the electric vehicle market. Initially, Ranadive saw an opportunity to significantly reduce air pollutants and started with the intent to build his own electric vehicles, however, the higher cost of electric vehicles seemed a barrier to adoption.

Unlike other conversion kits in the market, which are largely a combination of loose parts that require training for assembly and installation, Pixy’s powertrain is a plug-and-play solution that enables conversion in automotive environments with regular tools and repair staff. Pixy works through dealers and distributors for vehicle conversion, and has already seen large in-bound interest for partnership.

From a funding perspective, Pixy has largely been bootstrapped. The company, working out of an auto cluster in Pune, was selected in 2016 to be part of the incubator at Science and Technology Park, Pune. Through its participation in the incubator, Pixy has received extensive mentoring and seed funding from the Department of Science and Technology NIDHI PRAYAS program. Pixy was also recently selected as part of Niti Aayog’s Atal New India Innovation Challenge.

The company plans to raise funding to support its manufacturing scale and growth plans, continuing to work in the wildlife, defence and luxury car conversion markets. Ranadive’s ultimate vision is to also manufacture specialty niche electric vehicles, customised for and serving the Indian market.