Inevitable Episode B

Startup Series: BOLT

Recorded on June 29, 2022 Published July 7, 2022

Today’s guest is Mohit Yadav, co-founder of BOLT.

BOLT was founded in 2017 with the dream of making electric vehicles more accessible by easing and accelerating the transition of emerging markets to cleaner mobility. Currently, the company manages India’s largest EV charging network with over 10,000 charging points across 100 different cities.

Although we haven’t spent much time on the region here on the My Climate Journey podcast, this episode is particularly important given India’s population and emerging economy. How the country’s economy evolves in the years to come will be critical to global emissions reduction as its population is unfortunately feeling the effects of climate change today in a major way.

We have a great discussion about the state of the EV market in India, BOLT’s business model, their future expansion plans, and how the company started in software and evolved to include a hardware component.

In this episode, we cover

  • An overview of BOLT 
  • The company's focus on emerging markets and peer-to-peer network approach 
  • Mohit's background in software tech and journey into climate 
  • How BOLT sought to improve the two-wheeler experience and early challenges the company faced
  • BOLT's beginning as a software solution for making "smart" two and three-wheeler EVs and how they evolved to include a hardware component
  • Cost challenges of building a charging infrastructure in India 
  • Comparisons between EVs and smartphones
  • An overview of India's renewable energy sources 
  • Passive income incentives for BOLT customers 
  • BOLT's partnerships with retail chains, governments, etc. 
  • Future uses for BOLT's anonymous OS data 
  • BOLT's expansion from a global perspective, including trials in Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, etc.  
  • Running costs of EVs vs. ICE vehicles 
  • BOLT's funding to date
  • The company's open engineering roles