At the intersection of artificial intelligence, big data and India’s sprawling last-mile delivery economy sits a quieter kind of infrastructure problem — one Dr Srikanth Reddy Kalakonda set out to solve not with another app, but with a fully engineered data layer beneath it. Trained in AI and machine learning, he founded Hala Mobility in 2020 as an EV-as-a-Service platform, built around a simple but technically demanding premise: every electric vehicle on the road is also a live stream of data on driver behaviour, battery health, route risk and vehicle serviceability, waiting to be interpolated, modelled and acted on in real time. That thinking now underpins an integrated ecosystem of EV subscriptions, leasing, financing, charging and battery-swapping infrastructure, and fleet lifecycle management, running across a fleet of nearly 3,000 vehicles and supporting over 25,000 delivery partners and drivers. In an interaction with CE, he talks through the engineering and data science decisions behind that system — and what it takes to build mobility infrastructure for a market EV technology hasn’t fully caught up with yet.
Excerpts
What was the inspiration behind Hala Mobility?
If you look at the Indian mobility landscape, we always focused on comfort and convenience for people, but forgot about the ones providing it — the gig worker. After my PhD, while building a product called Chippy in Europe, I looked at how to bring this fragmented ecosystem into one place. But the driver was still burning money on unreliable petrol vehicles, so the idea was to switch him to electric vehicles, so both customer and driver would win.
When we started Hala in India, it was primarily around giving analytics to fleet operators — for example, a city council setting up charging infrastructure needed reliable data that didn’t exist. But the pandemic hit, so we pivoted into fleet operations, renting out electric vehicles ourselves. Today we’re evolving into what we call SEED — a Sustainable Ecosystem to Empower Delivery Partners — giving gig workers vehicles, jobs, credit, financing, housing and medical support.
You started Hala Mobility at a time when EV adoption in India was still at an early stage. What did you see then that competitors perhaps didn’t?
Even today, we’re in the very early stages of EV adoption. When we started, the technology wasn’t upgraded, batteries weren’t safe, scooters weren’t reliable. We had to do a lot of R&D to bring in a standardised product, learning our lessons the hard way, since guidelines and policies weren’t proper and most products coming to India were unreliable assembled imports from China. It took us at least four years to get here — we’re in our sixth year now.
Then, after the fiasco with Ola’s battery burnouts, it hurt market sentiment badly. Today, after a lot of R&D, we have stable products, including what I’d say are globally some of the best batteries and swapping stations, helping us scale further.
Coming from a background in AI, big data and technology, what drew you specifically towards electric mobility and the last-mile transportation space?
My work relied heavily on telecommunications, big data, machine learning and AI, and I wanted to bring that into mobility. Any commercial vehicle has to be tracked, traced and monitored. It’s not just a moving vehicle, it’s a data source; understanding how a driver uses it, its risk patterns and serviceability, and the driver’s behaviour. Insurance and financing become easier and more affordable for the gig worker. What we look at today as fleet operations is really a wealth of data being processed for better services.
How would you differentiate Hala Mobility from the other competitors in Hyderabad?
Not just in Hyderabad, but across India, what we’re solving is fundamentally different. Deploying many vehicles isn’t the end goal; how well you utilise them, create uptime and provide quality of service is what matters. It’s also about design — which vehicle fits a last-mile use case, especially in a highly vandalised, abusive environment where you need a utilitarian vehicle, not the smartest one.
Today, almost 93% of our vehicles are utilised, versus around 65% for the competition. A vehicle doesn’t just run for two or three years; it can be refurbished and redeployed. We’ve finished two life cycles in our sixth year, and the vehicles still perform better — reducing total cost of ownership and increasing the vehicle’s lifetime value.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in the early days
From day one, no one was ready to finance EVs. The second bottleneck was the customer psyche. We started with our own capital, deployed vehicles, and learned as products and batteries failed and customers weren’t happy. We got creative with business models, like bringing vehicles off the balance sheet through operating or financial leasing, and had to be patient to convince people to bring their vehicles onto our platform. Once we started doing things better than the market, we brought in a lot of franchises too.
Policies were in a very grey area, with no straightforward framework for an EV rental or leasing platform. In fact, in 2023-24 we were almost about to go bankrupt, but we stood firm and changed things the way we wanted.
What has been the biggest misconception about EV adoption among fleet operators, delivery partners or businesses that you’ve encountered?
The mindset was that these vehicles couldn’t run in the last-mile space, couldn’t cover longer ranges, weren’t sturdy — so everyone, including us, switched to performance vehicles. But performance vehicles never give the unit economics a business needs. If a gig worker spends ₹300-400 a day travelling 100-120 km, I need to offer him real savings — say, cutting that to ₹300, a 25% saving.
So we switched to a low-speed, utilitarian vehicle, and showed customers market statistics — a petrol two-wheeler runs at not more than 20-24 km/h on average, a four-wheeler at 11-12 km/h, which is the average speed we operate at. Once we explained and educated drivers with this narrative, the shift slowly started working in our favour.
How do you balance the larger sustainability mission of Hala Mobility with the realities of building a profitable and scalable business?
This business is asset-driven and people-driven — if the bottom line isn’t intact from day one, it will never fly. Some organisations have raised millions of dollars, yet their revenues are almost flat. We engraved profitability into the business from day one — we raised hardly 21 crores, and today every rupee invested generates about ₹5, while the market average is ₹1 generating negative one rupee.
On the other side is impact. We’re running operations in tier-two and tier-three towns, with help from foundations, and found that women there could become entrepreneurs by running an electric vehicle themselves in an e-commerce or quick-commerce model, beyond farming or odd jobs.
Today, an average person in India makes ₹15,000-16,000; my gig workers make ₹25,000-30,000. On the environmental side, we’re running almost 174 million green kilometres, saving tons of CO2 emissions and petrol consumption.
What’s the roadmap for Hala Mobility?
By the end of next financial year, we’ll be deploying close to 60,000 lifetime vehicles, and by March 2029, we should be at a lakh units, with SEED flourishing across eight proprietary verticals — vehicle manufacturing, battery manufacturing, battery swapping and installation, financing, insurance, housing and medical support. At the end of the day, if a gig worker wins, I win.