EV start-up Ather Energy appoints Karan Punjabi as finance head

Electric vehicle start-up Ather Energy, which is preparing to commence production and sales of the S340 electric scooter, has announced the appointment of Karan K Punjabi as its Head of Finance. Karan’s appointment is in continuation to the addition of senior talent across functions at Ather over the past few months.

Karan, a chartered accountant, has over 12 years of corporate finance experience. In his previous role, he was chief financial officer at Arvind Internet where he contributed significantly in cost reductions, increasing efficiency of spends and strategy formulation.

“As we scale further, Karan’s introduction is significant as it will help us run a tighter ship. He will bring more rigour in spending and investment decisions. The task cut out for him is to strike the balance between efficient financial processes and freedom to innovate,” said Tarun Mehta, CEO of Ather Energy.

Karan commenced his career at KPMG, and then moved to Flipkart where he served as director of business finance. At Flipkart, he led the supply chain and lifestyle category finance, and was involved in fund raising and corporate finance.

“I am excited and looking forward to be part of this younger and creative start-up that has built an electric vehicle from scratch," said Karan. "I hope to use my years of experience to work with the key stakeholders on budgeting, annual planning as well as on financial strategy for the business going forward.”

Earlier this year, industry veteran Venkatesh Padmanabhan (ex- CEO of Royal Enfield) joined Ather as Chief Operating Officer; Sunitha Lal (ex-CHRO at Matrimony.com) as Head of Human Resources and Thiruppathy Srinivasan (Senior Advisor at IIT Madras) joined as Vice President of Vehicle Development. 

Ather Energy, the brainchild of IIT graduates Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain, was founded in 2013 and so far has received funding of Rs 205 crore from Hero MotoCorp, $ 12 million from Tiger Global and $ 1 million from Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal.

Ather is building India’s first truly smart and connected electric scooter, the S340. Aided by a breakthrough in-house designed lithium-ion battery pack, the Ather S340 has a touchscreen dashboard with cloud connectivity, a host of smart features and offers a top speed of 72kph and a range of up to 60km.

Ather is also setting up a charging network with its own smart charging pods. These fast-charging pods will be set up initially across its three market cities – Bangalore, Chennai and Pune.