CEO Insights India

Let’s accept the truth. The textbook culture being the single largest culprit, a major wedge of engineering graduates in India lack confidence when it comes to applying their learning. But Aditya Ganjapure (Co-Founder & CEO, Lithos Motors Pvt. Ltd), a young Mechanical Engineer, always contemplated beyond the four walls of classrooms. While most of the students kept it to the textbooks, during his junior college days, Aditya dissected his father’s Maruti 800 to hands-on learn the meticulous details of a vehicle!

Cut to the present, Aditya stands where he deserves to be. A leader with innovation in his DNA, Aditya along with his college-buddy Angad Singi (Co-Founder) incepted Lithos Motors, a five-year old emerging startup that innovatively fulfills last-mile commute and delivery needs by designing and manufacturing electric two-wheelers & three-wheelers. CEO Insights engages in an exclusive interview with this Young Entrepreneur Award (by Indian Achievers Forum) winner to further explore about his entrepreneurial journey and the anecdote of Lithos.

You founded Lithos as soon as you finished your engineering. What was the inspiration?
It all began from our (mine and Angad’s) impulse to participate in the yearly all-India students competition conducted by SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) called SAE Supra and SAE Baja, which were respectively about making F1-type cars and all-terrain vehicles. We had to start from scratch, since having a SAE group in our college with at least 50 members was one of the basic criteria to participate. We coordinated the entire task right from convincing our batchmates & our seniors who initially laughed at us, to convincing our management.

Our efforts paid-off as we ended-up creating a super compact vehicle with limited resources & expertise, finishing the event on the positive side. We created five cars in the successive years, inspiring our juniors to continue the tradition. We made a foldable electric moped as our final year project, which also won the first prize in SAE western section project competition. All these milestones added-up to forming an entrepreneurial mindset. In addition, I worked in a steel plant for six months as Production Shift In-charge and Angad worked in a startup called Neuron, before launching Lithos.

Your company is also well known for its freshness in work culture. What accounts for this?
I emphasize more on people and company culture than the product, because I always believe that the intangibles are more important than the tangibles. You can always emulate the tangibles, but something you cannot imitate and buy is people’s dedication, devotion, loyalty and spirit towards you and your cause. I would put it in this way in automotive language; ‘the company culture is like a strong rim of fast moving all-terrain vehicle wheels, which bind everything together in any harsh condition’.

How do you combat the cut-throat challenges in the EV industry?
The Automotive industry is more than 100 years old. So, it is pretty much matured in every aspect. If you have an innovative mindset, the manufacturing process holds solutions to all your challenges. To give you an example, we received a minimum quote of around Rs.11 lakh for making the fixtures of our vehicle. With some tweaks and thinking, we were able to make it with a budget of Rs.40000.

The more mistakes you make, the more you learn. To be very frank, we have not come to the perfect business model in the first attempt. It took us around a year to just come onto the right business model and

start working on it. The learning from our mistakes helped us chalk-out the current business model of giving EVs on monthly-rental to B2B businesses, which is a win-win situation for both our customers and us. This model fortunately works well in the pandemic situation as well.

As technology is ubiquitous today, what are your strategies to leverage the best out of it and carve-out beneficial solutions for both the company and the clients?
Yes, technology is ubiquitous today. So, the better service you provide, the more bonding you create with your customers. For instance, our prime customers are food delivery companies like Faasos and Dominos. Post understanding their sophisticated operational needs, we provided them with additional output from our battery to their food bag to keep the food warm, enabling them to deliver hot food every time. This additionally cost us just Rs.500, but created a huge difference for the customer. These are the simple things that help to create stronger bonds. Once you go that extra mile for the customers, you can easily attract more from the market organically.

What is your mantra to strike the right balance between your busy professional life and personal life?
For me, the best thing to do is to make a not-to-do list rather than a to-do list. If you stop doing certain unproductive and unnecessary things, your life will be the most sorted and balanced one.

Aditya Ganjapure, Co-Founder & CEO
A Mechanical Engineer from SRCOEM College Nagpur, Aditya is a passionate techno-entrepreneur. An automotive enthusiast from his childhood days, he recently won the Young Entrepreneur Award by Indian Achievers Forum at the hands of Prahlad Singh Patel (Union Minister of State for Culture & Tourism) and his Excellency of Fiji, Yogesh Punja.

Angad Singi, Co-Founder
Angad is a young passionate entrepreneur who lives his childhood dream. He is a Mechanical Engineer from SRCOEM College Nagpur.

Mahendra Sengar, Chief Product Officer
A Mechanical Engineer from SRCOEM College Nagpur, Mahendra has played a key role in Lithos’ product design.