Gurugram EV Charging Startup Failed For 19 Months Before Cracking The Right Product - Gets US Funding

Founded in November 2022, Tobor is a technology company based in Gurugram, Haryana, dedicated to establishing EV charging infrastructure that enables businesses and individuals to charge their electric vehicles with ease and convenience.

Dr. Vivek Prakash and Gaurav Lohia are the founders working behind Tobor with a simple vision: to build a product that simplifies electric charging along with addressing environmental challenges.

They’ve recently bagged significant funding from Peter Norwood, a well-known serial entrepreneur from the United States. 

The former Google Engineering Director who has led a team of 1000 people has decided to invest in Tobor after seeing the immense potential of the company’s tech product.

But how did it all happen? 

What made someone like Peter Norwood, who has never really invested in India, pick Tobor of all companies?

In a conversation with Startup Pedia, Gaurav Lohia says, “It actually goes back to last year. Peter has always been our strategic advisor and we kept sharing weekly progress reports with him. Getting funded by him is a milestone for Tobor.”

PHASE I 

In early 2022, Gaurav and Vivek started working on EV charging as a domain.

While Gaurav has experience in Machine Learning, IoT, and SaaS solutions, Vivek Prakash has decades of experience in the field of Sustainable Environment and Pollution.

He explains, “What we wanted was to make a socket where EV charges could be plugged in, and eventually charge the vehicles. My co-founder, Vivek Prakash, asked me how much time it would take me to build the product - and in my characteristic confidence, I told him that it’ll take just one week.”

While the entrepreneurs did take exactly a week to make a proof of concept, the actual product took them a whole year.

In late 2022, Gaurav and Vivek Prakash also founded their company Tobor — under which all these operations took place, plans were made, and extensive trial and error occurred.

But when the product was ready, a setback followed! It wasn’t feasible for the market and wasn’t really solving a major gap.

According to Gaurav, “It was just a socket, and honestly, nothing revolutionary. We knew we didn’t want to do this. We planned to build an integrated product.”

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PHASE II

Even though a whole year’s efforts seemed to amount to nothing, Tobor’s team was not one to give up.

Gaurav, Vivek, and other people in the company immersed themselves in reading more research papers about EV chargers and finally decided to hire a vendor who would help them.

Gaurav mentions, “This was the phase when we decided to make chargers. The vendor we hired was actually very good at the technical part of things, like the PCB. I and Vivek would go to his office and spend long hours there. It took us 3 months to make that charger.”

Despite everything being in place as far as the tech was concerned, the charger eventually gave way to a glitch in communication. It was simply unable to interact with the car it was supposed to charge, thus rendering it useless.

“This was Tobor’s second setback. We were now running short on funds too,” Gaurav adds.

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PHASE III

Gaurav and Vivek had now realized that they needed subject matter expertise in Tobor. Just hiring a vendor here and there or trying to do it all by themselves hadn’t worked out for them.

They started contacting consultants on LinkedIn and hired three of them.

“One of them was handed the hardware part of the faulty charger, the other had to manage firmware, and the third was assigned software architecture and creating a complete cloud infrastructure,” Gaurav explains to Startup Pedia.

Gaurav’s and Vivek’s experience merged with the consultants’ expertise in tech was a combination that worked!

A fully functioning charger was ready in about four months. The Tobor charger could now power and charge vehicles, even though it couldn’t stabilize them yet.

It was in March 2024 that the EV charger was launched in the market.

Tobor started installing the charger systems in residential societies. Gaurav recounts what happened in the first installation itself, “One of the security guards in a building complex had switched off the power button by chance. I was monitoring the functioning from my home at 2 AM in night – and saw that the charger wasn’t working. I ordered fruits and groceries for the guard on Blinkit. I asked the Blinkit delivery person to hand over his phone to the security guard and let me talk to him.”

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The guard eventually understood the instructions and switched on the power supply, resulting in the successful operation of the charger.

Parallelly, the development of the mobile app and the dashboard kept happening. Tobor smoothened out the gaps and by June 2024, the company had launched a fully-functioning Tobor charger hub that was end-to-end integrated with the platform.

PETER NORWOOD x TOBOR

Since June 2024, Tobor has installed a total of 12 charging stations in the cities of Delhi, Meerut, and Gurugram.

Tobor’s smart solutions stand out in the market because everything is developed and managed in-house. From designing, coding, and manufacturing the chargers – all operations are controlled and quality-checked internally.

Gaurav remarks, “This also helps us reduce costs wherever necessary and feasible.”

The company provides both AC and DC fast charging, ranging from 3.3 kW to 60 kW. This caters to a wide range of electric vehicle models.

Currently, the revenue model is distributed into two buckets:

1. Operating chargers 

2. Selling chargers

Under the first one, Tobor’s customers make payments directly on the app to use the charging services. Under the second one, the company sells the chargers to entities like electrical vehicle manufacturers and fleet operators.

Since Peter Norwood had been in touch with Tobor’s founders for an entire year, he recognized the potential in the company’s world-class manufacturing and tech capabilities. The final product – the charger and the hub — caught his interest, and he decided to invest in Tobor. Interestingly, this will be the first Indian company he has chosen to invest in.

Tobor is now a fast-growing technology company that wants to empower India's electric revolution with its seamless charging systems. It focuses primarily on the B2B channel of sales. 

Gaurav says, “We are helping businesses and manufacturers with EV charging solutions that are world-class in quality and performance, but 100% made in India.” 

Tobor is passionate about installing its charging hubs across the country's housing societies, hotels, and institutions.

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