The News
India-based electric sports motorcycle manufacturer Ultraviolette has raised a USD 85 million Series E round led by Bangalore-based deep tech fund Yali Capital and TDK Ventures. Importantly, technology executive Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel since March 2025 and advisor to Yali Capital, will serve as an advisor to Ultraviolette. Lip-Bu Tan also serves as Chairman of Walden International and is a founding managing partner of Walden Catalyst Ventures and Celesta Capital.
This is Ultraviolette’s largest round to date, and also the most significant one for them, as the proceeds will fund the factory that they need to build for the Tesseract scooter.
TDK has now doubled down on the Ultraviolette story. Ultraviolette last raised funds in Dec 2025, raising USD 45 million from TDK Ventures and Lingotto (Exor). That funding was aimed at developing the upcoming Tesseract scooter and Shockwave enduro motorcycle, as well as funding an aggressive expansion of the retail network and sales and marketing efforts.
Niche Manufacturer Plagued by Slow Sales
Ultraviolette is a niche manufacturer with good engineering capabilities and a passion for electric motorcycles. While that creates capable sports motorcycles, the fastest for any Indian manufacturer, it also puts them in direct price competition with very capable and versatile 250-400cc ICE motorcycles from KTM, Suzuki, Harley-Davidson, Honda, Royal Enfield….basically everyone.
This is also a brutal segment where customers have high spending power, never a good thing when it comes to electric motorcycles. The customer smirks at TCO calculations. He can afford whatever the pump is charging. Performance is the only thing that attracts people to this segment.
Here the situation is slightly convoluted. Electric sports motorcycles, like the ones made by Ultraviolette, can go fast. They can also go reasonably long. They can’t do both together.
In a market like India, a 250cc+ motorcycle is also a networking and bonding tool where riders, in groups, often ride 100 km each way to grab breakfast. Lifestyle motorcycling is getting big in India, and buyers have a wide range to choose from. Electric motorcycles, like the Ultraviolette X47 and F77, despite their big battery packs, still struggle with highway range and don’t catch the leisure rider’s attention. Not to mention, the F77 has a supersport-like painful riding triangle that born-again bikers wouldn’t agree with.
Sales remain slow despite the big push in the last six months. Most sales growth has come from an aggressive retail network expansion that the company is undertaking. That, and the launch of the X47, a slightly cheaper but more acceptable everyday machine, have mattered.
The Importance of the Tesseract
Here is where the Tesseract scooter becomes important. Unveiled in March 2025, the Tesseract, even though a performance-oriented scooter, has a broader mass-market appeal than the F77 and X47 motorcycles.
We wrote about this in March 2025.
InsightEV – Global Electric Mobility
The Tesseract was offered at an introductory price of INR 125,000 for the first 1,000 buyers, and Ultraviolette says they have 70,000 bookings for the same. This is important because the new dealer principals who have joined Ultraviolette and have invested capital in setting up the sales & service facilities have done so in anticipation of the launch of the Tesseract.
The Deep Tech Recognition
The investment by Yali Capital is important because it recognises Ultraviolette as a deep-tech play in the electric motorcycles industry. Before Ultraviolette, Yali had invested in six companies in robotics, semiconductors, life sciences, AI, and smart manufacturing areas. Ultraviolette is part of its smart manufacturing portfolio.
Compared to other investee companies in Yali’s portfolio, this is a leap of faith and a venture into a heavily contested territory.
The other investor, TDK Ventures, is doubling down on UV with this investment. TDK is also a deep tech investor, with its other major investment in the EV space being Exponent Energy, a Bangalore-based player with an innovative fast charging solution.
Impact
We know an investment is at the DocuSign stage when the management starts sharing renders on social media of a planned new factory, a factory that they have been trying to raise funds for. The Tesseract needs a manufacturing plant, and that needs investment. A chunk of this money is headed toward setting up the factory, which Ultraviolette calls the BIGGA factory (BIG Global Ambition) that the Ultraviolette management has been sharing renders of on LinkedIn. At full capacity, the plant would be able to produce 250,000 two-wheelers per year.
Ultraviolette has been positioning itself as a deep tech play in the EV sector since last year’s investment by Lingotto and TDK Ventures. This is important as it gives it access to funds in the deep tech area, an area arguably hotter than mobility. It also moves UV away from mobility-focused funds that would have focused more on mundane things like economies of scale, monthly sales, and BoM costs.
However, it is the ‘Deep Tech’ area that Ultraviolette has to focus on more. Despite all the image building, Ultraviolette is essentially riding a decade-old 60V platform in the X47 and F77 motorcycles. The old platform means that the F77 is bloated, as we mentioned in July 2025. This is how we compared the F77 to other motorcycles across the globe.
It’s not that Ultraviolette is not capable of doing better and bigger. The F99 performance demo motorcycle used a 400V system and hit a recorded top speed of 265 kph. But it stays a concept. Meanwhile, Chennai-based Raptee Motorcycles already has a 400V motorcycle in the market.
For the company, the next big step would be the upcoming Tesseract that will move to a 100V architecture.
Ultraviolette has the engineering prowess. Remember, this is a company that has been around for more than a decade and has built everything in-house. Unlike many of the above motorcycles we paper-compared the F77 against, the Ultraviolette motorcycles do exist and are sold every month.
However, being slotted as Deep Tech needs another level of engineering prowess and a focus on the fundamentals.
Management Speak
“We first met Lip-Bu in 2019 when we still pre-revenue. All we had then was prototypes in various stages of development on both battery pack architectures and pre-production motorcycles. Lip-bu was highly encouraging of our approach of vertical integration and first principles thinking. Having someone of Lip-Bu’s experience, conviction and global perspective believe in that vision means a lot to us.” – Narayan Subramaniam – CEO Ultraviolette (via LinkedIn)
“Some journeys have a way of coming back around. We first met Lip-Bu Tan in 2019, when Ultraviolette Automotive was still a very young company with an outsized ambition to prove that world-class technology, design and performance could be built in India and taken to the world. Seven years later, our paths have come together again. We are incredibly excited to welcome Lip-Bu, Chairman of Walden International, alongside Yali Capital and TDK Ventures, as investors in Ultraviolette’s $85 million funding round and to have Lip-Bu join us as an investor and advisor on the journey ahead. – Niraj Rajmohan – CTO Ultraviolette (via LinkedIn)