Electric mobility startup Yulu is laying the groundwork for a mainboard IPO and expects to become public-market ready once it reaches annual revenue of ₹1,200-1,500 crore, according to co-founder and CEO Amit Gupta. The company's plans come on the back of its Series C funding round of $93 million, comprising $63 million in equity and $30 million in debt.
Gupta said the capital has arrived at a critical point in Yulu's evolution, as the company looks to scale its fleet, expand its geographic footprint and build out the infrastructure needed to support its growing urban mobility and logistics business. “We are focused on building the financial and operational metrics that would make a public listing viable. IPO is more like an outcome. We have been EBITDA profitable since April 2025. The next key milestone is PAT profitability which I expect Yulu to achieve sometime next year,” Gupta told Autocar Professional.
Why Yulu Is Raising Debt Alongside Equity
The $93 million fundraise also marks an important change in Yulu's capital structure. The company has historically relied heavily on equity because its business model was still being proven. Investors and lenders were uncertain about how long the vehicles would last and how many kilometres they could run, limiting Yulu's ability to raise debt at scale. That has changed with the company's growing maturity and profitability, Gupta says.
Gupta said the company had been able to raise close to $10 million in debt after achieving EBITDA profitability, but is now looking to increasingly blend equity and debt. “We needed a non-dilutive capital at scale,” he said. Part of the latest equity capital will continue to fund capex until Yulu reaches PAT profitability. Once it crosses that milestone, Gupta expects the company's capex to be funded entirely through debt. The latest capital will therefore also act as a balance-sheet cushion, supporting Yulu's ability to raise larger amounts of debt as the business scales.
Yulu's IPO Strategy: Metrics Over Valuation Hype
Gupta said Yulu's approach to the public markets will be deliberately different from the hype-driven valuations that characterised some startup funding and listings. The company, he said, has spent nine years building a fundamental business rather than relying on “vanity metrics” or speculative narratives. “We were never a company who was built on hype. Every dollar of valuation for us is hard earned. It's not on the hype, but on the metrics. So it will be far more number and value creation driven,” he said. He expects the same philosophy to guide Yulu's eventual listing.
The company's value proposition, he said, will ultimately be measured by margins, operational performance and the competitive advantages it has built over time. He also sees the latest funding round led by GEF Capital Partners as an endorsement of Yulu's underlying business model. The investors, he said, are coming in with the expectation that the company can use growth capital to move towards the public markets rather than needing to experiment further with its basic proposition.
Yulu's Fleet Expansion to 200,000 EVs and 20 Cities
The Yulu of today is considerably broader than the shared mobility company it started as. Gupta describes the business as an “urban mobility and livelihood infrastructure company”, with its stack spanning vehicles, technology, data, apps, service infrastructure and battery swapping.
The company is targeting a fleet of 200,000 vehicles over the next two years, with quick commerce currently the biggest driver of its business.
Gupta said almost half of Yulu's revenue now comes from quick commerce, while food deliveries and a newer category of quick services account for much of the remainder. While acknowledging the concentration, he argued that Yulu's exposure is not dependent on a single platform. The broader shift towards hyperlocal deliveries and gig work, he believes, is structural. The company's vehicles have already been adapted across different use cases, from quick commerce and food delivery to services ranging from home cooking and cleaning to salons and spas.
“Quick commerce being one of the large ones,” Gupta said, pointing to the broader movement of goods and services in urban India as the opportunity Yulu is trying to electrify.
The next phase of growth will come from both geographic expansion and new vehicle formats. Yulu is currently present in 12 cities, of which it directly operates in four, while franchise partners operate in eight. The company plans to reach 20 cities over the next 12 months. Within existing cities, it plans to add service centres, customer touch points and battery-swapping infrastructure through its joint venture Yuma, while also entering new cities.
At the same time, Yulu is expanding beyond its original single-seat, low-speed vehicle through Yulu Express, a two-seat, higher-payload product. Gupta stressed that Express is not a pivot away from Yulu's existing model but an extension of it, allowing the company to address a wider range of use cases using the same technology and operational infrastructure.
Yulu's fleet expansion will be accompanied by a significant increase in battery-swapping infrastructure through Yuma, its joint venture with Magna. While Yulu remains Yuma's largest customer, Yuma is also expanding into other use cases, including electric three-wheelers. The two businesses are therefore growing in tandem, Gupta said.
At present, each Yulu bike requires roughly 1.5 battery swaps a day. On that basis, 100,000 vehicles would require around 150,000 swaps a day. With Yulu's larger Express vehicles also expected to consume more energy, Gupta estimates that when the company's fleet reaches 200,000 vehicles, Yuma could be handling 350,000-400,000 swaps a day for Yulu alone. Taking into account its other customers, he expects Yuma's total swapping volumes to reach 500,000-600,000 swaps a day at that point.
Yulu's Competitive Moat: Reliability, Data and Trust
As competition intensifies in electric last-mile mobility and quick commerce, Gupta believes Yulu's biggest competitive advantage will not be simply its vehicles. Instead, he sees the company's moat as a combination of product reliability, data, infrastructure and trust.
Yulu's vehicle platform has gone through three major platform changes and more than 100 vehicle-level changes, including six iterations on its current Bajaj platform. Because its vehicles are connected, the company has accumulated detailed data on component failures, operating conditions and city-specific issues. “This is a product which only time can buy, money cannot buy. The second layer is infrastructure,” he says.
Building compliant service centres and battery-swapping stations requires approvals, power infrastructure and operational capability, creating another barrier to entry. But Gupta sees trust as the most important moat, particularly because Yulu's vehicles are used by gig workers for their livelihoods. “For someone to trust you, you have to really walk the talk,” he said.
Yulu's Unfinished Agenda: Return to People Mobility
Despite the rapid growth in goods and service mobility, Gupta said Yulu has not abandoned its original ambition of solving urban people mobility. The company's founding missions were to reduce traffic and air pollution, with improving livelihoods becoming an additional objective after Covid-19. Its original shared-mobility proposition was focused on helping people make first- and last-mile journeys, but that business took a back seat during the pandemic.
Gupta now calls this an “unfinished agenda”. Yulu eventually wants to address the friction people face in getting to metro stations and covering short urban distances, particularly where cabs are unavailable or expensive. But he said the company will take up that challenge only after its core business is firmly established. “We want to make the movement of person also frictionless,” Gupta said, adding that the company would return to people mobility “after a few quarters”.