That realisation set Tarun Mehta on a very different path.
Weekends meant hopping from Chennai to Bangalore — crashing with Swapnil, talking electric vehicles, reading everything he could find, and slowly convincing his future co-founder that this wave was real.
Inside IIT Madras, everyone knew the signs:
Tarun, a yoga mat and pillow in the lab, obsessing over EVs, building battery packs, filing patents for swappable batteries.
The first idea wasn’t a scooter.
It was batteries.
A swapping network.
Infrastructure for the coming electrification wave.
But something didn’t click.
People loved the scooter the batteries were mounted on — not the batteries themselves.
That insight changed everything.
Maybe the problem wasn’t energy.
Maybe the problem was the product.
Swapnil backed it fully.
No halfway solutions. No infrastructure-first detours.
If they were going to do this, they’d build the entire vehicle — end to end.
That decision became Ather.
In this episode of The Blume Podcast, Tarun Mehta tells Karthik Reddy how curiosity, conviction, and a few Bangalore weekends led to one of India’s most iconic EV companies.
⚡ Watch the full episode now — the real origin story of Ather.