Pune-based energy storage solutions startup, Clean Electric, has successfully raised $6 million in a Series A funding round. The round was co-led by prominent investors, including Info Edge, Pi Ventures, and Kalaari Capital, with participation from Lok Capital and other investors.

Founded in 2016, Clean Electric is at the forefront of innovation in the electric vehicle (EV) industry, offering cutting-edge rapid charging technology that can fully charge EVs in under 12 minutes.

In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Akash Gupta, CEO of Clean Electric, highlighted the company’s focus on scaling up operations and enhancing research and development efforts.

With the new funds, Clean Electric aims to grow its operations by 10 times over the next year, expanding its leadership team and investing heavily in R&D to further innovate its lithium-ion battery technology.

“With this $6 million fundraise, we intend to scale up our operations. We are expanding our leadership team to be able to grow 10x over the next 12 months and continue growing from there on. And we are also heavily investing into the research and development. As the breakthrough which we have got is on the fundamental science-based innovation, which we have come up on the lithium-ion batteries. So there is continuous R&D, which we need to do over the next few years to be able to bring down the price of the battery to at par with what other OEMs are offering, but with a 200% to 300% better performance. So that is the high-level plan. We’ll be scaling up our operations to 200 megawatt hour, and then also to invest in R&D and the core leadership positions so that we can build a sustaining large-scale organisation from here on,” Gupta said.

Clean Electric’s proprietary electric two-wheeler batteries, which fully charge in just 12 minutes, have already been commercialised. The company has deployed nearly 1,000 battery packs across 37 cities in partnership with OEMs manufacturing electric two-wheelers.

Gupta mentioned that the company is also in advanced certification stages for its three-wheeler battery packs, which can charge in under 20 minutes using an open network charging protocol, positioning it as a game-changer in the e-rickshaw and electric three-wheeler market.

In addition, the company is piloting electric four-wheeler battery packs, including those for cars and light commercial vehicles, with plans for production in 2025.

Financially, Clean Electric is already generating monthly earnings of around $1,00,000, equating to an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of approximately $1.5 million.

However, the company has ambitious plans to grow exponentially, targeting a $12 to $15 million ARR by the end of 2025. This growth will be primarily driven by the expansion into the electric three-wheeler and four-wheeler markets, which are expected to undergo certification and commercialisation in the coming years.

In a separate development, Private wealth management platform Centricity has successfully raised $20 million in a seed funding round, reaching a valuation of $125 million.

This significant round was led by Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from notable investors such as the MS Dhoni Family Office, the Burman Family Office, and OYO’s Ritesh Agarwal, among others.

The fresh capital infusion will enable Centricity to scale its two key platforms—Invictus and One Digital—while expanding its private banking services and exploring strategic acquisitions

Manu Awasthy, Founder & CEO of Centricity, emphasized that the funding will be allocated primarily toward technology investments.

“This entire money that we have raised is for growth purposes. We are going to invest heavily into technology,” Awasthy said

The company plans to increase its 75-member tech team to 175 and launch three new business lines: NR (non-resident) investment services, insurance broking, and stock broking. Additionally, Centricity will strengthen its Invictus platform by adding 40 to 50 private bankers to cater to families with financial portfolios exceeding ₹100 crore.

Awasthy highlighted the ambitious growth plans for One Digital, Centricity’s retail B2B2C platform, which already operates 27 offices across India. “We intend to map almost 95% of India and scale it up to at least 100 to 125 offices across the country,” he added.

Looking ahead, Centricity aims to significantly expand its assets under management (AUM) over the next five years. Awasthy outlined plans to grow One Digital’s AUM from ₹5,000 crore to ₹50,000 crore, primarily targeting Tier-II to Tier-IV cities. Similarly, the Invictus platform, which caters to UHNWIs, is expected to add ₹60,000 crore in AUM, bringing the company’s total target to ₹1,00,000 crore.

Additionally, G42, a UAE-based technology holding group, has announced the upcoming launch of Nanda, a state-of-the-art Hindi large language model. Nanda is a 13-billion-parameter model, trained on approximately 2.13 trillion tokens from language datasets, with a focus on Hindi.