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PURE EV: Going Against 'Scale Fast, Fail Fast' Culture

In a market littered with the wreckage of cash-burning EV startups, PURE EV bets on financial discipline and engineering grit. But can its playbook withstand competition from legacy players, funding hurdles and heavy import reliance?

By Darshan Nakhwa & Ketan Thakkar

02 Jun 2025

6475 Views

Nishanth Dongari Founder, PURE EV

India’s electric two-wheeler market is a brutal arena, a graveyard of over-hyped startups that soared on venture capital only to crash when subsidies vanished or batteries caught fire. Amid this chaos, PURE EV, a 2018 spawn of IIT Hyderabad’s incubation labs, is an outlier. Founded by IITians Nishanth Dongari and Rohit Vadera, PURE (Power Using Renewable Energy) began with a scrappy ethos, retrofitting old scooters with electric kits pieced together from off-the-shelf wheels, motors, and electronics.

“We spent two years tinkering on campus, testing prototypes before we even thought of selling,” Dongari recalls. That restraint—prioritizing engineering rigor over market ...

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