Early 2000sThe tower or the phone. Both founders were in telecom when rival standards fought for the same space and nobody wanted a handset without coverage or a tower without handsets. Private operators piled in behind the government and the scaling was very fast. That memory is the lens they hold up to charging infrastructure. One of them started at Siemens, when a phone still meant a licence and a waiting list.
2017Numocity starts, off one picture. Energy has three parts: somebody supplies it from the grid, somebody transacts it through a charger or a battery system, and somebody has to make sure it is consumed in a way that extends battery life. They say they are still using the same picture to explain the company.
2018-19Electric mobility is still a fancy thing. Their read at the time was that it belonged to somebody else rather than the masses, and that nothing would change until it became systemic enough to deploy at scale.
Jan 2020IdeaSpring writes the first institutional cheque. Naganand's fund could see from networking and telecom where the market would end up but not when, in an industry moved by policy and heavy capital, so it backed founders who had built comparable systems elsewhere and took the timing risk. ABB came in small as a strategic investor and spent two years watching how the company executed.
2020-21A year of nobody travelling. A company whose fortunes track the mobility ecosystem spent the pandemic uncertain where either was going. Climate policy pushed back harder, in India and abroad, and Numocity came out of it with more than 60 customers, two of them among the largest companies in the country.
May 2022ABB buys the company outright. A complete exit for IdeaSpring two and a half years after its cheque, a partial one for the founders, who stayed. What sold it was commercial rather than architectural: a product deploying in the field beyond ABB's own hardware. Multiple diligences from firms around the world, and the proceeds left India without a hurdle.
TodayA build-out that arrives in instalments. Quoted estimates put global charging infrastructure near $100 billion, with India a much smaller slice, and infrastructure keeps getting built rather than landing at once. The founders now have three or four years to take the product into more countries, and they place India a year or two from the moment private capital piles in.
