 Who better a person to start this evening with than other than Puneet Goyal, who is the founder of Blue Smart. As I was telling you that Ida was really at about big tech and startup tech and how they are sort of bringing the new tech together. So here we have a young founder who is actually doing that and more at Blue Smart. So you know the way they are building the right hailing business and the charging infrastructure in this country and doing pretty much the full stack of mobility in this country is really amazing. So first of all a huge round of applause we travel in his caps and we always admire how we sort of gone all the way and enjoyed that right. So thank you for joining us today evening Puneet. You know given the fact that you've been a late entrant in this space. You know we had Ola which is homegrown and then Uber which is a global company. So what was the opportunity that you saw that gave you the right kind of vision to say that you know there is a gap in the market and that is the gap we are going to cover and you know and Blue Smart was built. Yeah so I think the market opportunity we saw was massive. I mean we are building an energy infrastructure and mobility company in alphabetical order. So everybody I don't know how many of you have used Blue Smart here in Bangalore and how many of you must have used Blue Smart in Delhi and we look like a consumer centric ride hailing service but besides that we are also building large scale EV charging infrastructure and the idea was very simple. We figured out that companies like Uber will not be able to really build out charging infrastructure. They are largely purely ride hailing companies. It will be very difficult for Uber to really transition to becoming an energy and infrastructure company. They have never done that in the past and we thought it would be great to partner with a company like Uber so when we got this idea back in 2019 we started off by partnering with Uber. We deployed the cars on the Uber platform. We started off with deploying about 10, 20, 30, 40, 70 cars on the Uber platform finally scaled our partnership to about nearly 300 cars and we figured out that Uber will need EVs and they don't know how to build charging infrastructure. So when I teamed up with my co-founder Anmol who is an energy veteran in the renewable energy space he runs the company called Gensal and I pitched my idea to Anmol and I said that look, I had this thesis or thought process that the EV transition is going to happen in the US and also in India and it's imminent that all cars will become eventually electric but platforms like Uber which don't own the cars, don't own the charging infrastructure and completely dependent on an outsourced model where third party drivers are bringing cars on the platform companies like them will never be able to go fully electric because they will depend on third party drivers ability to bring cars, bracket electric cars and also figure out where the charging infrastructure is. So it will be a very long drawn process for companies like Uber let's become an enabler for Uber to go fully electric. How can we do that by building out the charging infrastructure by bringing electric cars and partnering with Uber BluSmart 1.0 was there we deployed the BluSmart cars on the Uber platform and for one year everybody was saying here la la Uber chahiye because if you would summon an Uber car a BluSmart car would arrive and pick you up it's like booking a Malaysian Airlines ticket in Singapore Airlines coming and picking you up so people were pleasantly surprised with the high quality experience they were experiencing on the Uber platform that was a journey 1.0 and on 5th December 2019 after having spent a year with Uber we graduated from the class of Uber 2019 so we are Uber class of 19 actually having worked with Uber for a year and then we migrated to our own platform which was BluSmart we haven't looked back since and we started scaling because we understood that the missing point was the fact that in the EV world you need more than electric cars and you need charging infrastructure so how are we looking at this business is a business where we are building a vertically integrated born electric, e-mobility ride-hailing service and EV charging network where we build out EV charging superhugs which becomes the founding tenet or the founding or the bedrock on which the ride-hailing business is scaling and the ride-hailing business of BluSmart becomes the anchor tenant to the charging infrastructure business and that really allowed us to scale another point we saw this is all on the supply side innovation and we are bringing EVs on the platform the bigger opportunity we saw on the consumer side when we were using Uber in India or Ola in India in back in 2018 was the fact that the consumers were unhappy there were a lot of ride denials happening, some surge pricing issues people were paying exponentially for mobility and we thought we could probably create a differentiated experience a slightly elevated one for the consumers and start providing a much better service than what they were getting we also understood that India of 2018-19 was a tad different from the India of 2008 and 2009 people are now more well-traveled, globetrotters they go overseas, they experience much better forms of mobility these are Indians who go overseas a lot so we saw that Uber in the US was able to offer great service and we understood the underlying challenge was supply side drivers in India have to buy cars and these are really poor people, they did not go to IIT Roorkees or IIM Ahmedabad or IIM Calcutta these are very poor people who have this trouble of buying a car and they deploy the car on the Uber platform to earn from it the Uber global model is the Airbnb of mobility model where the cars are already there in the US largely US is a $2 trillion automobile market India's GDP is $4 trillion so in layman language the automobile market in the US is half of India's GDP and that is where cars are already available and cars can be on the platform of Uber or Lyft in India with the asset ownership is really low it's 40 cars per thousand people in China our neighbour is about 275 cars per thousand people US is about 700 cars per thousand people it's slightly easier for models like Uber to really scale and bring assets but in India the biggest code strength of Uber in the US is the biggest weakness in India bringing assets is a challenge and because the drivers are so disgruntled and unhappy all that is passed through the customer experience and customer is the one who ultimately receives all the unhappiness of the driver and the customers are unhappy so we thought we will launch two industry first features the first one being zero ride denials so we started with the concept of offering a car to the customer without any cancellation from our side zero cancellation from our side second one we thought that we will not do any surge pricing we will keep the experience consistent fixed pricing like platforms like the BST Bus or Bombay or the Delhi Metro or Tube of London or Subway of New York these are transportation platforms and pretty reliable ones but all of them are fixed pricing structure you already know what you are going to pay for so we thought this will be two good product features that the consumers may like may not like God knows but let's probably roll them out and let's see the feedback I mean the feedback was amazing people in mega cities of India want reliable mobility everybody wants to go to school on time you want to go to write your SAT exam on time GMAT exam on time you want to make it to the entrepreneur show on time you want to go to the airport on time you want to go to the railway station on time you want to attend a marriage on time you want to go and see the movie on time you want to go and attend your child's convocation ceremony on time so time with the capital T is finite for me for a more juggie for bill gates for all these entrepreneurs here time is equal for everybody everybody has 24 hours in a day nobody gets just because you are a rich person you don't get extra time and people were not able to reach their destination on time so we said okay let's sell time, let's sell reliability let's be that mobility player which probably addresses that big challenge around ride dinas that I think was the success for us and consumer love came in we provided that consumer experience and we created that differentiator experience for the consumer they had a reliable ride hailing service regardless of the season COVID, not COVID or whatever season and that's what consumer really loved that's on the consumer experience side but you know you also interestingly built a model of EV leasing now you know it's a very inclusive model where you sort of want to bring a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of people into your ecosystem so what was the idea behind it what was it that you know what was your purpose of building a model like that so leasing of assets was the only way for us to scale we figured out that the drivers are the weakest point of the ecosystem a driver is not a McQuarrie, a driver is not a GP Morgan a driver is not a Crestaway, a driver is not a BlackRock a driver is not a Tamasek it's not a driver's core ability to bring car on the table a driver is the poor person who is just trying to fend for herself or himself a driver's job it will drive and fundamentally we figured out that a driver's core skill set is to drive a driver is not a financing institution a driver is not Bandhan, a driver is not ICICI so why to burden the driver with bringing a car on the table given that India is a poor market it's a two wheeler and three wheeler market 78% of India travels on two wheelers and three wheelers if I add bicycles and tricycles then 88% of India travels on two and three wheelers across everywhere India is not a four wheeler market it's only 40 cars per thousand people and we didn't want to burden poor people owning cars and that gives them stress when you eliminate stress from somebody's body the efficiency of the person goes up and when the person is stressed all the time of fuel cost or car cost how to pay for EMI then the experience of the person or the overall service quality will go down so we said okay, now if the drivers can't bring cars let's decouple drivers from asset ownership let's institutionalize the entire supply side and both my co-founder and mole and I we spent some time in the renewable energy space where we worked with large DFIs who funded our solar projects so we went to the same institutions and we said okay, look we are going to build this right-hailing service and charging network will you fund cars, will you finance us for cars and we want to lease the car so very similar to the way Indigo Airlines works or Lufthansa works or British Airways works they lease planes so we took the analogy from the aviation sector we say we lease our aircrafts or lease our electric cars and we are looking at cars like aeroplanes so we will go to DFIs and applying Pareto's principal and economic student so I thought we should go to institutions who have the ability, capability to finance thousands of cars one driver can bring one car on table one DFI can bring 5000 cars on the table so if and you know everybody has 10 fingers in their hands if you go to 10 institutions they all can fund 100,000 cars we don't need to go to the 11th institution only for getting cars so that's what we set out to do we started leasing cars we created a leasing platform that leasing standalone SPV then gets the loan from DFI Sanction today we have money in the bank for 20,000 cars on the road we have only 6,000 cars so a lot of money sitting in the bank to deploy the biggest road block for blue smart is charging infrastructure and we understood that if this is the biggest road block for us must be for others also the biggest opportunity and the biggest road block is charging infrastructure the more charging infrastructure blue smart or companies like blue smart can build the more EVs we can bring on the table so again it goes back to my earlier thesis that we are an energy infrastructure mobility bracket ride hailing company in alphabetical order my mentor who helped me build this business is friend Calinicus he is a guy who raised 5 billion dollars for Uber in 13, 14, 15 he was CF of Uber I had a chance meeting with him in Nevada in 2017 I had gone to see this company called Hyperloop One and I had gone to meet him for that and we were sitting and talking in Malibu beach in Los Angeles and Brent showed me a charging station of charge point which was charging a BMW i8 car it was the first time I saw a charging station charging an EV at the Malibu club in Los Angeles and Brent said something very interesting which became the founding tenant of blue smart he said that companies like Uber are air BNBs of mobility in layman language asset is there you can monetize it it will be very difficult to create air BNB of electric mobility in layman language there are not many assets on the road what will you monetize that doesn't exist and I started thinking that that's a great that's true we have to first create assets then monetize them so we can't create a monetization model before assets only don't exist so we had to re-engineer our supply side in order to give a differentiated customer experience and that differentiation of the supply side innovation had to be done otherwise if we would be at the back-end call of a poor driver buying a car then we'll have to be 20 years for EVs to come on the road and hence we had to build out this entire differentiated supply stack how does solar fit into the puzzle given the fact that there is so much riding in India on solar energy and the government sort of pushing solar out there so where does it fit again was always our call we are from the renewable space we believe that solar is the cheapest form of electron the best way to produce energy when I in fact met Amitabh Khan back in 2018 and with this idea of blue smart as trying to convince him sir this should be done, India should do EV at that time CNG was 46 rupees a kg and I remember this cost of CNG went to 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 it reached 93 rupees a kg nobody knew that the cost of CNG was a darling fuel in India all ride hailing platforms in India used CNG as their main fuel and with that cost of CNG went up 2.46 times in just a matter of 4 years including the pandemic period when we had this idea petrol and diesel in India was 65 rupees a litre in 2018 the cost of petrol went above 100 rupees a litre so we understood that if we will be at the beck and call of crude or fuels like petrol, diesel and CNG you can never make money because the cost of fuel will always go up, India's import bill was 60 billion dollars when the finance minister at the budget in 2018, India's import bill is now above 120 billion dollars, maybe will be 200 billion dollars, you try to do something in methanol, ethanol and all that but still the cost will keep going up because India has a fast doing economy, 8% GTP growth more people are now having disposable income, lot of discretionary spending more people are buying cars right now more people will need oil and China in USA so we thought okay now we will have to shift to using EVs as the first base but eventually to further lower our cost and to become profitable at scale, we will use renewable energy but that should happen at scale so now blue smart has about 6000 cars we have covered about 0.4 billion kilometers on the roads, 400 million kilometers, we have completed 12.5 million trips, we are doing about 60-65 million dollars of annual revenue, now is the right time to shift to renewable energy and so we partnered with Tata Power as the first project where from their 200 megawatt solar power plant in Bahrami, Rajasthan we have contracted a 30 megawatt solar capacity, so Tata Power is supplying us 30 megawatt solar energy from their 200 megawatt solar power plant in Rajasthan India has one grid one nation policy so we get the energy which is powering our 42 megawatt power load of all our charging hubs in turn powering 160 megawatt trees across 6000 cars in Delhi in CR and Bangalore, so this is the first of its kind where blue smart becomes the world's first EV ride-hailing service and charging network to be 100% powered by renewable energy so we now are decarbonizing mobility at scale and that was a mission statement from Devan, it's just that we are executing it now that's great and I mean you know at what scale you are doing it, it's so nice to hear it and you know it's amazing to see and now they have also stepped differently out of India as well so I think you are going to be soon, you will find blue smart cars in UAE as well if I am allowed to make this statement now or my co-founder will kill me but yeah maybe sometime this year I will probably be diplomatic here sometime this year in some coming months we will be in an overseas market and we will obviously share it with the media and also with our friends right now we are focusing on the core fees of Delhi and Sia and Bangalore but yeah with ambitions for obviously looking out so you are also incidentally the chief of fund raising for blue smart so you know and they say that your investor goes with you a long way so it's a good marriage that sort of goes for many years so how do you sort of select your right investor and how does the investor select you and where do these minds meet yeah in terms of the the tag I mean I had to become chief of something so I didn't know what to do in the company besides just making the logo of blue smart but I see one of the investors in the jury, Sandeep Bhamar he is an investor in blue smart green frinter capital we went on one of these platforms in 2018 and Molan and I were presenting blue smart I think everybody was laughing at us saying that what are these two people doing I mean we were laughing stock at that time I think there were more than 200 people who were telling us don't waste your time you guys are renewable energy entrepreneurs focus on building solar projects this is not your cup of tea in the Ola nobody can make a dent nobody will be able to do some naysayers today along the fundraising we have found probably the same we still get the same reception but there are some people who believed in us and like minded people who believed in the long term vision of the company and now with the EV adoption actually picking up there's a lot of knowledge also a lot of people now today I know a lot of people have now become PhDs electric mobility I know I meet a lot of people who are now have the domain knowledge also so it's slightly easier to now share our story with investors also we are not targeting every kind of investors so now we understand that since we are a very different kind of company we are targeting energy transition funds we are targeting climate impact funds infrastructure funds largely we are looking at ourselves as an infrastructure and so we are only targeting infra investors not VCs infrastructure capital investors growth debt and growth capital investors who are investing in the clean energy space or the infrastructure space and they believe that this is a good story in the making infrastructure is needed for India's growth if India were to scale from a 4 trillion dollar economy to a 12 trillion dollar economy that will happen on the back of 5 trillion dollars in infrastructure investment as for McKinsey, Bain, BCG they all are saying that India will need new investments of about 5 trillion dollars and we are playing a very small part there in infrastructure for tomorrow and EVs are batteries moving batteries and charging infrastructure is also critical for India's growth so largely cheating the infra kind of investors infrastructure investors we will also like to explore your entrepreneurial side so you were right from your days at Harvard I believe were you sure that entrepreneurship is your journey to go forward or did you sort of wanted to be working for a while before you sort of jumped the bandwagon of entrepreneurship so I think I was in London then I was studying at London School of Economics and I started at that time thinking that I should do something in the clean energy space I had met a consultant in India when I had come down and he at that time was telling me that solar could be the next big thing and after finishing my graduation I went to another college called Aston Business School in Birmingham where I did my dissertation on something I had to do I chose clean energy as my dissertation topic and those few months I wrote a paper on renewable energy and that got me excited to venture into my first venture of solar panel manufacturing when I came back to India in 2008 and got into the renewable energy space by manufacturing solar panel the first four years were great we achieved revenues of close to 100 million euros we were manufacturing solar panels in India exporting to Europe 8, 9, 10, 11 was great but the market crashed plummeted I went to bankruptcy and I had to shut down my first venture after having achieved sales of about 100 million dollars it was a very bad time for me in 2012 I almost was completely wiped out on the road and I thought probably this is my end of entrepreneurship should I never want to be an entrepreneur again let us go work for a company and much easier but then again I said maybe not I should try again so I did my second venture which was a solar power plant we built out in Gujarat that's my co-founder and he built it out for us and that's how we met and it was a good success we got pretty good money for selling it and the third venture again and then obviously when I exited all my solar ventures and I had a chance meeting in the US with Brent with this idea came up and I think everything just led to another I had no idea that I would probably be here when I am today it's a journey that we you know have traversed over time and probably learned with failures I think each failure teaches you something new and probably opens more doors till you don't fail you don't learn if you want to be in your comfort zone then probably you will never learn anything so it's good to fail, good to learn from people and then yeah either you can learn from your own failures or somebody else's failure but regardless you have to learn from somebody's failure yourself or somebody else's and now that you are embarking on an international journey how how sort of differently are you going to approach building a business outside India versus building it in India yeah so in India as our geography market very well and it's our pack office here so we know what the market is I think what we have delivered here is a great consumer experience so I think in consumers really happy we have become a brand now there's a lot of Indian diaspora that travels overseas and they want that brand also there the market that we are trying to open to is also where a lot of Indians are or go there and we believe that there should be some need for us there okay so what is the need is ride healing a challenge there deviate option being promoted by the government is there a need for blue smart there identifying that market doing the research on it you know a lot of conviction should we launch not launch should we stay back in Indian market continue build here which is a great strategy and we will do that but also keeping our eyes and ears open on opportunities overseas so we are still in that phase right now and like I said we are trying to build it we've got the permits approvals licenses to operate in the market very financially financially very with all our money to operate there is that we need to take that big bold step to actually launch there but otherwise the foundation platform is ready and you know so we have in this room some big tech shots and we also have very young startup founders so any sort of message you have for the young startup founders given your own journey as a founder you know as to how they should build the enterprise I think I always believed at least with the blue smart journey that you have to believe in yourself and people will laugh at you or not believe it if you only don't believe in yourself nobody will believe in you so the first person to believe in yourself is yourselves you have to believe in your own self you don't need third party validation or somebody smile or clap or happen you have to believe in yourself if you believe in yourself you can do anything you want and don't do things for third party validation do it for your own validation if you're happy don't do it if you're happy do it and I mean that's the way I've always seen in life I don't care about what people think I care about what I think and yeah that's what I probably can share with you so believe in yourself ladies and gentlemen a huge round of applause for Puneet probably got you know a unicorn and a global entrepreneur being born very soon out of India and blue smart is probably ready to go big guns and many sort of congratulations to you for building blue smart and all the very best in your journey as you sort of embark to a more bigger market and the world not just India but the world so thank you very much for talking to us