Ravi Kempaiah, co-founder of Zen Electric Bikes in Dartmouth, will now focus the company on the manufacture of batteries.DARTMOUTH, N.S. — Ravi Kempaiah came back to Dartmouth from three weeks in India with what sounds like a bad cold, and what sounds like a good deal.
Three years is the typical warranty for a battery, but Kempaiah told the companies he met with in India that he can build batteries that last four times as long. “We started as an electric bike company, we still believe that could be a great platform to test our battery technology. But the real scaling of the company would be in supplying batteries to everybody, even other e-bike companies,” he said.
“They’re trying to diversify their energy portfolio by investing in more mature markets, like the U.S. and Canada,” said Kempaiah. “In June, our contacts at Nova Scotia Business Inc. informed us that there’s an investor from Africa looking to invest in clean-tech companies here.” The immediate demand from India is for batteries to be used on electric mopeds, with huge potential in the equipping of three-wheeled taxis, ubiquitous in India.And it will manufacture those batteries in India and in Dartmouth.
“Since we won’t be building the whole bike, just building the batteries, the supply chain problems will be less. We will get the cells from Korea or Europe,” Kempaiah said. “Our idea is we will keep our bike business B2B until we set up our battery manufacturing facility. There’s not a single e-bike company in North America that is building batteries within North America.”