In-house engineering and localisation key to delivering dependable EV Charging products | Discussion with Intellicon Technologies

Founded in 2021 by Vaibhav Agarwal and Arnab Mitra, incubated at IIT Delhi and recognised by DST, Meity, GAIL, and many other Government initiatives, Noida-based IntelliCon Technologies specialises in building Power Electronics products indigenously. IntelliCon Technologies has developed portable 3.3kW and 7.2kW AC-Type 2 charging solutions for Electric Vehicles. Currently, IntelliCon Technologies is focused on engineering and manufacturing EV Charging solutions for light EVs, particularly electric 2Ws and 3Ws, engaged in last-mile operations. We had a chance to interact with Arnab Mitra, Co-founder & CTO at IntelliCon, and discuss their approach to delivering products that help build a reliable ecosystem for last-mile electric mobility.

Can you please discuss your current scale of operations as an EV charger manufacturer?

We had been working on technology development till last year. From an engineering standpoint, building a compact, highly compact, and rugged charger is quite a challenge. We launched our first product in the market in 2024. Since then, we have worked with our patrons and integrated our chargers with close to 15~20 different OEMs operating in this space. We have finally started regular product sales from this Financial Year. Currently, the focus is on scaling up production and testing processes.

What are the USPs of the chargers that IntelliCon is designing?

• Waterproof, rugged, long-life chargers with long-term component-level service support.

• Client-specific customisation options due to in-house engineering.

• Focus on localisation, core engineering, and indigenous manufacturing.

As a bootstrapped start-up, why did you choose to concentrate on the last-mile space?

We believe that EVs are the perfect solution for intra-city travel and logistics, particularly where the distances are short and predictable. Thanks to rapidly increasing metro rail penetration, a huge population has already moved to clean transport. With e-rickshaws becoming ubiquitous, we can significantly mitigate pollution concerns in high-density localities.

Last-mile logistics is another space where EVs will make a lot of sense in cities. 2W EV sales are also growing rapidly for personal commuting. The EV 2/3Ws segment is extremely price-conscious, so non-serious trading companies will find it difficult to compete with serious companies focused on engineering and manufacturing in the long term.

As a bootstrapped startup, we have to pick our lane very carefully. Our expertise is in power electronics; we understand chargers deeply. Moreover, we wanted to focus on a segment where EV adoption is driven by clear economic benefits, not discretionary spending. Because 2/3W EVs deliver high value-for-money, adoption in this mass market can be expected to be more organic. Due to all these factors, we decided to focus on enabling EV adoption in the mass market segment.

Can you discuss your approach towards localisation of EV chargers, and what kind of domestic value addition is achieved by IntelliCon in its end products? What parts (cables, enclosures, coating materials, PCB assembly) can you source domestically or manufacture in-house?

Localisation, for us, started with in-house engineering. We invested over 2 years building chargers and understanding the customer pain points at a grassroots level. Once we achieved product-market fit, we started working on localisation aggressively.

In the coming few months, we are confident of being able to localise almost everything that goes into building a charger, except for electronic components, because we don’t have local sources available for chip components, ICs, etc. We have already set up manufacturing in Noida and are currently working to ramp up production and testing capacities.

How does localisation help with introducing cost efficiencies for your customers?

Localisation helps solve multiple problems.

– Importing components and assembling everything in India incurs lower customs duty. However, it requires significantly more effort and technical expertise as well. We are confident that skill can be developed with practice. Once the processes and skills have been developed, the cost advantages due to customs, freight, transportation, cash flow, etc, will add up. The same can be passed on to our patrons.

– Localisation helps us build the indigenous ecosystem of suppliers so that our dependence on imports is reduced.

– Localisation also helps us provide job opportunities to manufacturing labour, as well as design and engineering job opportunities to engineers.

How does your approach towards in-house designing and PCB assembly help your B2B customers (fleet operators / OEMs / swapping solutions providers) with customisation and after-sales support? Could you share any examples?

India is a huge and diverse market. The conditions vary a lot. Also, customer requirements change a lot. Having in-house engineering allows us to be close to the customer and solve problems better. We have already integrated our chargers with close to 15~20 OEMs, overcoming several technical challenges.

Secondly, we are in the B2B space. Since our focus is on EV 2/3Ws, the B2B market requires high-volume, low-margin solutions, which means that we have to eke out cost efficiencies from every aspect of the business.

In-house engineering enables us to reduce our hardware inventory, allowing us to build a common hardware inventory and distribute it to different customers with client-specific firmware changes. If we did not have in-house engineering, we would have ended up with a wide range of SKUs, which would have increased our costs significantly.

In-house engineering enables us to continuously improve our testing processes, reducing the assembly, manufacturing, testing, and dispatch loop, which in turn improves our cash flow velocity.

It also helps us provide component-level servicing of our products. Without this, products often end up in landfills, even for minor issues and breakdowns, leading to serious electronic waste problems.

For a major battery swapping company, we developed a solution that enables our charger to support 15 different make/OEM batteries. It took months of integration effort for us to succeed. None of the trading companies in our space has been able to do it. Solving such hard problems helps us build a defensible moat.

We are also technology development partners for several large organisations because of our in-house engineering competencies.

Do you see any skill gaps in the workforce that need to be addressed to allow for more domestic value addition?

We believe that the cost of certain quality items remains high in India, which is why other companies rely heavily on complete imports. At IntelliCon, we are committed to the localisation of engineering and manufacturing on a long-term basis. That’s the only way we can deliver high-quality products at a fair price to the market.

As far as skill is concerned, we are not worried because the government has put a lot of focus on incentivising Electronic Manufacturing in India. We are in discussions with many Tier-1 partners for high-volume manufacturing at competitive pricing. We do feel that engineers, in general, try to avoid core engineering jobs because the skill development process is more time-consuming than IT jobs. But as the focus shifts to manufacturing, engineering talent will also follow.

Please tell us about your team size and manufacturing set. What are IntelliCon’s scale-up plans?

We have close to 20 people full-time in our Noida head office. We have manufacturing tie-ups with tier-1 EMS companies in Noida for scaling up our production volumes. We are also increasing our team size for R&D and QC.

Also read: EV charger manufacturer Zenergies raises USD 2 million in seed round