“I want to an IPO when we are very close to profitability and I think it’s still a journey for us,” Mehta said on the sidelines of a consumer event in Bengaluru on Saturday.
“Ather used to lose like Rs 1.50 for every rupee earned as recently as 12-15 months back. It has changed radically now, but we are still not profitable, and I want to be very close to it if not actually profitable when we publicly list.”
In a separate interaction with ET, Mehta said the funding environment had become difficult even in the electric vehicle space.
“I think directionally all of us can see in the last six months, cheap liquidity is over,” he said. “So, you can’t pursue a strategy where you say, ‘let’s burn capital to grow’, that’s very dangerous. I’ve been saying that in our business for the last two years, we hike prices because we believe that we need margin to grow.”
Ather, which is among the early players in lithium-ion battery-powered high-speed scooters, has been facing stiff competition from the likes of SoftBank-backed Ola Electric and TVS Motor. Both companies sold more scooters in December 2022 than Ather.
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Mehta said worrying about the market share would be the wrong way to look at the business, and distribution, which it was scaling rapidly, would be the key for sales to pick up in the long run.
“Market shares in the EV space today have absolutely zero correlation to actual market demand or market reality,” Mehta said. Three months back Ather was selling only in 40 cities, but now it is selling in over 90, and still only covers a third of the pin codes in the country, he said.
“Some of our competition is selling across the country. TVS is selling its iQube in more than 250 stores across the country and Ola is selling in every village also, so the addressable market is much larger,” he said.
At the community event, addressing 700 of its customers, Ather launched a new charging solution called “Neighbourhood chargers” for apartments, which the company believes can help solve the problems faced by residents living in large cities. Users will be able to charge their non-Ather two wheelers and four wheelers as well. Mehta told ET that the company was yet to figure out a monetisation model around it.
The Bengaluru-based startup is also scaling up its charging network from 900 points currently to 1,300 by March this year. Ather announced upgrades to its hardware, design as well as software and also launched new colour variants on Saturday.
In October,
Ather raised $50 million from existing investors, in an extension of $128 million of funds raised in May. The company was valued between $700 million and $800 million in October, ET had reported.
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