The Ultraviolette Startup Story – How Narayan Subramaniam and Niraj Rajmohan Built the F77

Millionaire Mondays by Backstage with Millionaires

In this podcast interview, Caleb sits down with Narayan Subramaniam and Niraj Rajmohan (Founders of Ultraviolette Automotive) to talk about their journey of becoming entrepreneurs, building Ultraviolette Automotive from scratch, struggles they encountered along the way and what the future holds for Ultraviolette.

Ultraviolette Automotive was founded by Narayan Subramaniam and Niraj Rajmohan in 2015. They started the company with the vision of building India’s high-performance electric motorcycle – F77. After years of hard work, the team at Ultraviolette is ready with their first motorcycle the Ultraviolette F77 and it is now available for pre-order.

Early Childhood: Narayan and Niraj have been friends since the age of 10. While, Niraj started coding at the age of 9-10, Niraj’s interest in playing with Legos drew him towards building and designing stuff at an early age.

College Days: Coincidentally, the two of them even ended up in the same college. They started tinkering with ideas and building robots and cool gadgets. They took their interests further by participating in a lot of competitions and winning around 30-40 of them.

Going their separate ways: After college, Narayan decided to go deeper into learning designing automotive stuff, while Niraj went on to join Yahoo. But both of them continued to indulge in their creative endeavors on the side.

Niraj quits his job to startup in the hyperlocal space: Along with a bunch of friends, Niraj decided to start his entrepreneurial journey by jumping into the hyperlocal space. They were building a platform that would connect people who had shared interests in their area. But they failed to monetize the platform and decided to wrap up the project.

Narayan and Niraj come together to build Ultraviolette Automotove – The two friends came together and decided to re-ignite their interests and started exploring opportunities in the rapidly growing EV space. And Ultraviolette Automotive was born.

Exploring opportunities in the EV space: At the time, While they were trying to figure out what they will build - they experimented with everything from smart wearables to batteries to last-mile electric mobility vehicle.

Rejected by hundreds of investors: Investors had stayed away from investing in hardware startups as they demanded a lot of capital but had a low success rate. But the founders believed in their vision and moved ahead.

Advice to entrepreneurs looking to raise their first funding round: Believe in your product and remain open minded. Evolve and polish your idea and product over time before presenting it to the investors.

Ultraviolette gets seed funding to work on Ultraviolette F77: After hundreds of rejections – Ultraviolette found the perfect seed investor in the form of Speciale Invest.

Hiring the right people: Equipped with capital, Ultraviolette was ready to move from building prototypes to building complete versions of their electric motorcycle – F77. But they needed to find the right people who would help them grow and get to the next level.

Importance of capital while building an innovative EV startup: The founders soon realized that while building an innovative product, they would continuously need to raise funds and be creative with spending their capital at the same time.

Turning challenges into innovations: The team was using their expertise to bring down the cost of the parts by ten-fold while keeping the quality intact in order to stay away from raising capital as long as possible.

Key milestones: Ultraviolette was able to create batteries that were way beyond the normal batteries available in the market as they needed their batteries to pack more power in a restricted space.

Future of Ultraviolette: The company is looking to scale production and distribute their electric motorcycle F77 to all parts of the country and also exploring options to sell overseas.