Nash Energy has shipped 2.5 million cells. e-TRNL is redesigning the electrode from first principles. Log9 raised $60 million and ended up in insolvency.
Together, they tell the story of whether India can build a cell-manufacturing ecosystem it actually controls.
In September 2024, a cylindrical lithium iron phosphate cell - 32 millimetres across, 140 millimetres tall, 3.2 volts, 15 ampere-hours - rolled off a fully automated production line in Dobbaspet, an industrial cluster outside Bengaluru.
The company behind it, Nash Energy, is a division of a six-decade-old sheet metal and engineering conglomerate. The cell was the NEI32140E.
In the 15 months since, Nash has sold 2.5 million of them - to more than 40 customers building battery packs for electric two-wheelers, three-wheelers, and home energy storage systems.
No Indian company had independently manufactured lithium iron phosphate cells at this scale before.
India is the world's third-largest energy consumer, the world's third-largest automobile market, and a country that has committed to an electric vehicle transition, a battery energy storage buildout, and a defence modernisation programme - all of which depend on battery cells. It imports close to 100 per cent of them.
The Advanced Chemistry Cell Production Linked Incentive scheme, launched in October 2021 with Rs 18,100 crore and a target of 50 gigawatt-hours of domestic manufacturing capacity, was meant to change this.
As of October 2025, it had delivered 1.4 GWh - 2.8 per cent of the target - all from a single beneficiary.
The conglomerate gigafactories that are supposed to close the gap - Exide with SVOLT, Amara Raja with Gotion, Tata Agratas, Reliance with Faradion - are almost all delayed, and almost all built on Chinese or Korean technology partnerships.
And think of this: India's two largest battery companies hold seven lithium-ion patents between them. CATL of China holds approximately 50,000. The gap goes well beyond the factories, and into knowledge.
Five years and Rs 18,100 crore later, 2.8 per cent of the ACC PLI target has been commissioned. The deeper gaps - in patents and R&D spending - explain why.Against this backdrop, a quieter story has been unfolding.
A handful of Indian startups and companies - Nash and e-TRNL Energy among them - have begun building battery cells on Indian soil. Some are manufacturing today. Others are still in the laboratory. Some have designed their own electrode architectures and built their own machinery from scratch. Others have acquired foreign chemistry and are scaling it domestically. One raised $60 million and ended up in insolvency.
They are small, and are almost certainly underfunded relative to the problem. And they represent the only Indian efforts to build cell-manufacturing capability that India actually controls.
This is a map of where they stand.
The Landscape
India's battery ecosystem extends well beyond the companies making cells. Below the cell, component-level work is underway.
Altmin, in partnership with ARCI, the government's Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials, is building a cathode active material gigafactory in Telangana. Epsilon Advanced Materials makes battery-grade graphite.
Recyclers like Lohum are recovering lithium, cobalt, and nickel from end-of-life batteries and refining battery-grade materials.
Above the cell, pack assembly is a growing area of genuine engineering capability. Thermal management for Indian operating conditions - 45-degree ambient temperatures, potholed roads, voltage fluctuations - is a real design problem. BMS design, crash safety, and charge-discharge optimisation at the pack level require serious engineering. Several cell startups already work at this level.
What is casually called "assembly" involves chemistry, micron-level precision, environmental controls, and yield engineering - capabilities that India built rapidly after a wave of EV fires forced the industry to improve validation, thermal management, and BMS safeguards in a short span.
The components are emerging and the packs are growing. The cell is the missing layer - where Indian capability is thinnest and import dependence most acute.
One exception deserves noting. The TDSG plant in Hansalpur, Gujarat - a joint venture between Suzuki, Toshiba, and Denso - achieved electrode-level localisation for hybrid vehicle batteries in August 2025, using Toshiba's lithium titanate oxide chemistry.
Over a million Maruti Suzuki vehicles run on batteries from this plant, and more than 80 per cent of the battery's value is now created domestically. It is a genuine industrial achievement, but in a niche chemistry that does not serve the mass EV market.
For the lithium iron phosphate and NMC chemistries that electric vehicles need, the cell layer remains almost entirely import-dependent.
India has emerging capability in components and growing capability in pack assembly. At the cell level, domestic capability remains thinnest.Prof Sagar Mitra, who runs the Battery Prototyping Lab at IIT Bombay and has trained more battery engineers than perhaps any other academic in India, frames the talent dimension starkly. Each gigawatt-hour factory, he estimates, will need 1,000 to 1,500 trained process engineers. If the gigafactories that India has announced come up on schedule, the country will need roughly 36,000 of them.
"Which is not there," he says. "You have to bring it from China if you are not training."
The Forerunner: Nash Energy
Nash's achievement is worth understanding precisely because of what it reveals about the ecosystem it operates in.
The company's cell chemistry comes from Forte Nippon, a Japanese electrochemistry firm in Hanamaki that Nash acquired in 2021. The Japan team designs the electrodes and the recipe. The Bengaluru team handles process engineering and mass manufacturing.
On the Dobbaspet floor, seven process steps - slitting, winding, tab welding, electrolyte filling, formation, and more - unfold across 19 days, from raw material to finished cell. The line is fully automated. Everything from slitting to formation happens in-house.
The raw materials, however, come from outside. The cathode and anode materials are contract-manufactured in China, to Nash's proprietary recipe. This is the structural reality of cell manufacturing in India in 2026: even the companies making cells here depend on Chinese supply chains for the most critical inputs.
Nash is aware of this and working to change it. The company has developed a parallel, non-Chinese supply chain - sourcing from Australia, Korea, and others - that is functional but costlier. Indian electrolyte manufacturers, including Himadri Speciality Chemical Ltd from West Bengal, are testing with Nash's recipe. Nash plans to bring electrode manufacturing in-house by 2027 or 2028, once its consumption base reaches three to five gigawatt-hours.
"Whomsoever is in the supply chain in India who is working, they are working with Nash Energy," Himanshu Kansal, who heads sales and marketing, says. "We are not alone from the supply chain."
The market reception is real. Nash is selling cells to more than 40 customers, at prices competitive with CBAK, one of the Chinese manufacturers in the same form factor. But Kansal is blunt about the commercial reality: "Nobody is going to pay just for the sentiments of Make in India."
Nash's roadmap extends to 10 GWh, but the timeline is flexible, driven entirely by customer commitments. A two-gigawatt-hour prismatic battery pack line became operational in November 2025; prototypes and samples have been sent to international and domestic OEMs; commercial production is expected within months.
A joint venture with US-based Rincell adds NMC cells in the 18650 and 21700 form factors - high-energy-density cells for drones, defence, and high-speed two-wheelers.
The company also makes BMS, chargers, and DC-DC converters through Nash Tech Labs, which employs about 200 R&D engineers. Nash's LFP chemistry includes additives specifically formulated for Indian temperature conditions - a detail that reflects the advantage of owning your own recipe.
The Innovator: e-TRNL Energy
If Nash represents the manufacturing-first path - bring in the chemistry, build the factory, ship cells - e-TRNL Energy represents the R&D-first path. Its bet is the most radical in the Indian cell ecosystem: a redesign of the electrode itself.
Apoorv Shaligram, e-TRNL's co-founder, has been working on battery cells since 2008. He and co-founder Dr Uttam Kumar Sen met at IIT Bombay - in Prof Mitra's research group - where they helped set up one of India's first cell fabrication facilities. Both later joined Ather Energy's internal cell team. They started e-TRNL in 2021.
Conventional lithium-ion electrodes are thin coatings of active material on a metal foil - a design inherited, Shaligram notes, from cassette tape manufacturing. "All of your primary pioneers of the lithium-ion cell - Sanyo, Panasonic, Sony - were basically cassette tape companies."
The coating has thickened from about 30 micrometres in the 1990s to perhaps 100 micrometres today. It is still a thin layer. And it is, Shaligram argues, the root cause of three persistent problems: cells heat up too much (limiting fast charging), batteries degrade too quickly, and the polymer separator between the electrodes - made of the same material as a grocery poly bag - shrinks when overheated, causing the short circuits that lead to fires.
e-TRNL's 3D Electrode Architecture replaces the thin coating with a fine honeycomb of cathode material, several millimetres tall - 50 to 100 times the conventional height. The cathode forms pins that slot into the honeycomb. Each pin-and-hexagon pair becomes a micro cell. Current divides across thousands of these, resistance drops, and heating falls by what Shaligram calls "orders of magnitude."
The concept has been explored in academic labs - Shaligram says attempts were made in the US about 15 to 20 years ago. The obstacle was always manufacturing. "On a concept level, it works. Because it is physics. The challenge was, how are you going to manufacture it? How are you going to repeat it?" e-TRNL claims to be the first company in the world to attempt commercialising it.
To make the architecture, e-TRNL had to build its own machines. Over two years - mid-2023 to mid-2025 - the company designed and built more than 20 different machines, each undergoing five to 10 major design iterations. That is more than one iteration per day.
"In hindsight, I would say it was the right call," Shaligram says. "If we were working with partners on this, what we achieved so far would have been impossible in the given time."
The manufacturing simplification is dramatic. Conventional cell production involves 31 to 32 operations. e-TRNL has reduced this to about eight.
The reduction in steps translates directly to energy consumption; the reinvented manufacturing process uses over 50 per cent less energy than a conventional line, largely because it eliminates the energy-intensive drying ovens and solvent recovery systems that wet electrode production requires.
The copper and aluminium foils used as current collectors in conventional cells have been eliminated entirely. The polymer separator has been replaced with an all-ceramic separator sourced from Indian suppliers. Electrolytes are also coming from Indian suppliers.
Only the cathode and anode active materials are still imported, and Indian alternatives are being evaluated.
Conventional cell manufacturing requires 31-32 operations and imported equipment. e-TRNL's 3D electrode architecture reduces this to about eight - with machines built in-house.e-TRNL is at lab-scale prototypes today - the earliest stage of any company in this story. The Rs 27.4 crore seed round, closed in February 2026 and led by the IAN Alpha Fund, gets the company to a finished product validated by customers and a demonstration of modular manufacturing. The 250-megawatt-hour pilot comes after the next funding milestone.
But Shaligram frames the strategic significance of what e-TRNL is building in terms that extend beyond the product. China imposed export restrictions on cell manufacturing equipment to India last year. For companies that rely on imported machinery, that is an existential threat.
"That made us realise we are solving a much deeper problem," Shaligram says. "When we get to manufacturing, we are actually not dependent on anybody to stop us from scaling. Because it is our own IP."
Others in the Field
Every Indian company attempting to build battery cells, mapped by location, chemistry, status, and scale.The ecosystem has more participants than Nash and e-TRNL.
Godi Energy, based in Hyderabad and founded in 2020 by Mahesh Godi, has produced commercial-grade NMC 21700 cells and obtained BIS certification for both NMC and LFP chemistries. It is developing across lithium-ion, sodium-ion, and supercapacitors.
Graphite India acquired a 46 per cent stake via a rights issue in 2025, bringing an industrial partner with a materials supply chain. In January 2024, at Davos, Godi signed an MoU with the Telangana government for a 12.5-gigawatt-hour facility at Rs 8,000 crore.
The distance between the MoU and the factory, though, is large. Godi's total funding to date is approximately $12 million. The company employs about 108 people. It has not publicly disclosed commercial cell delivery volumes.
International Battery Company, founded in 2022 by Priyadarshi Panda, takes the Silicon Valley approach: R&D in the US, high-volume manufacturing in South Korea, a joint venture with Mahanagar Gas Limited for India.
IBC makes NMC-622 prismatic cells and is building a supply chain explicitly compliant with US Foreign Entity of Concern rules - a non-China value chain. The company raised $35 million at a $130 million valuation. In January 2025, a Rs 390 crore facility near Bengaluru's airport was announced, with production targeted within nine months.
Nsure, backed by the RCCL Group's Chandrakanth Ramalingam, is investing over Rs 1,000 crore of family capital to build a one-gigawatt-hour LFP pouch cell plant in Malur, Karnataka, expandable to five. The technical know-how comes from ARCI. No venture funding, no foreign technology partner - a distinct model. The company has been quiet publicly, and its current manufacturing status has not been independently confirmed.
Each company is pre-gigawatt-hour. Each faces the same structural challenge: no established Indian market demand for Indian-made cells, Chinese competition with 25 years of scale advantages, and capital requirements - Shaligram estimates five to 10 gigawatt-hours as the minimum for cost competitiveness - measured in thousands of crores.
The One Lesson: Log9 Materials
Log9 was founded in 2015 by Dr Akshay Singhal, an IIT Bombay alumnus. It raised over $60 million from Peak XV Partners, Amara Raja, and Petronas Ventures. The company bet on lithium titanate oxide - a chemistry offering exceptional safety and very fast charging at the cost of low energy density and high price per kilowatt-hour.
Then cheap Chinese LFP cells flooded the market and made LTO commercially unviable. Log9 invested approximately Rs 150 crore in a cell manufacturing plant that never scaled. Its workforce collapsed from roughly 350 to under 50.
The NCLT Bengaluru admitted Log9 and its subsidiary into the Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process after the company defaulted on Rs 6.7 crore. The tribunal noted that Log9's settlement offers - initially Rs 1 crore against the Rs 6.7 crore debt - were evidence of "serious financial distress."
"I think all three," Prof Mitra says, when asked what went wrong. "Chemistry selection was the problem. The business model was also maybe not suitable for India's conditions. And the ecosystem was not ready."
Shaligram, whose co-founder spent a year at Log9, is measured in his assessment. "Chemistry selection is tricky," he says. "Building the cell from scratch takes a fair bit of time, and if the market is not clear about its needs, a wrong choice can put you in a hard spot. Much like the global market, the needs of the Indian market are only becoming clearer now. Their choice of chemistry offered many attractive features, but in hindsight, it was probably not the right one."
He draws a broader lesson from the experience - and one that shaped e-TRNL's founding bet. "I keep asking this question. If I am working on a chemistry play and I am going to manufacture cells, what exactly is my core business? Is it manufacturing the material for that chemistry, or manufacturing the cell? Because both have very different businesses."
Battery chemistry changes every six months to two years at the incremental level, he notes. A company that spends five to six years developing a chemistry product has a two-year window to commercialise it.
"That is a hard place to be."
Log9's failure is consistent with a global pattern that has humbled companies with far deeper pockets. Tesla unveiled its 4680 cell in September 2020 and spent five and a half years - and billions of dollars - before production reached what the company called a satisfactory state.
Northvolt of Sweden, once Europe's great battery hope, raised approximately $15 billion, hired veterans of Tesla and Samsung, built a state-of-the-art gigafactory in Skellefteå - and filed for bankruptcy at roughly 70 per cent manufacturing yield.
New cell production lines typically achieve 30 to 50 per cent yield initially; commercial viability requires 95 per cent or above. The distance between a cell that works and a factory that works is where industrial ambitions go to be tested. India's cell startups are entering that distance now.
The Ola Question
Ola Electric - the only ACC PLI beneficiary to have commissioned any capacity - is attempting something ambitious.
A recent factory visit by science communicator "Gareeb Scientist" revealed that Ola's cell division, headed by a team that includes veterans of Tesla and the Chinese and Japanese battery industries, is using a dry electrode process to manufacture NMC 4680 cells.
Dry electrode technology eliminates the solvent-based coating and vacuum drying steps of conventional manufacturing, dramatically reducing factory footprint and energy consumption.
Tesla acquired Maxwell Technologies in 2019 partly for this technology and has struggled for years to commercialise it at scale. Ola's team claims to be among the first globally to make it work commercially.
The NMC cells have a published energy density of 275 watt-hours per kilogram - a globally competitive number. The factory is designed to scale to 20 GWh in the same building footprint.
The distance between design capacity and production reality, however, is large. In the October-December 2025 quarter, the factory produced 72,418 cells - roughly 1.9 megawatt-hours - generating Rs 9 crore in cell revenue against Rs 51 crore in cell operating expenses.
That is 2.5 GWh of installed capacity producing less than two megawatt-hours of output in a quarter.
The ramp-up gap is not unique to Ola - it is the norm in cell manufacturing globally - but it is the gap the company must close before the factory becomes a business rather than a demonstration.
Mitra's assessment of the dry electrode claim is measured: "Dry coating in large-scale manufacturing is still in R&D. Not fully sanctioned or approved." He adds: "They have a good team. I am sure they can do it."
Shaligram, asked about Ola, is generous: "From what I know, that is one company which has put a lot of effort on building in-house R&D capabilities, probably one of the best in the country."
Unlike the conglomerate gigafactories, Ola has deliberately avoided Chinese technology partners. Its cathode materials come from Umicore of Belgium, its anode materials from Epsilon Advanced Materials - an Indian company - its fast-charging R&D partner is StoreDot of Israel, and its manufacturing equipment is Korean.
In an industry where every other large Indian player has signed technology agreements with Chinese firms, Ola's sourcing choices represent a conscious strategic bet. The supply chain is still imported - but the import dependency does not run through Beijing.
The Hard Question
The steelman case for technology transfer is strong. India does not need indigenous cell technology. It needs cells. Demand is growing now. The startups are years away from contributing at scale. South Korea built its battery industry on Japanese technology. If Exide can make reliable cells using SVOLT's process, the cells work regardless of who designed the chemistry.
Log9 proves the point: the indigenous approach, pushed to its limit, produced insolvency.
There is a more structural version of this argument, and it comes from inside the conglomerate camp. Vikramadithya Gourineni, Executive Director at Amara Raja Energy and Mobility, whose company has committed capital to a cell gigafactory and is investing in a customer qualification plant, R&D facility, and materials testing infrastructure outside any formal incentive structure, argues that manufacturing ecosystems typically evolve from downstream upward.
India has done it before. In electronics, the country moved from box building to PCB assembly to component manufacturing to the semiconductor OSAT and fabrication facilities now under construction.
In solar, it went from modules to cells, and the first wafer and ingot facilities have been announced. In batteries, the sequence is the same: EV adoption first, then pack assembly and BMS, and now cells.
"Announcements are easy," Gourineni has written. "Industrialisation is messy and non-linear."
If the pattern holds, cells are the natural next step - and the most capital-intensive, geopolitically exposed, and technologically unforgiving one. The fact that timelines have slipped does not signal a change in intent, Gourineni argues. It signals that industrialisation is proceeding at the pace industrial capability allows, which is slower than policy timelines or press cycles demand.
Amara Raja's own gigafactory depends on a partnership with Gotion High-Tech, and his argument for patience may also be a defence of his company's model. But the downstream-to-upstream framing has an uncomfortable ring of truth. And his observation about a structural tension in the ecosystem matches what Nash has found at the factory gate. "Customers that themselves benefit from substantial tariff protection often continue to benchmark us against the lowest global pricing," Gourineni has written.
"It is difficult to simultaneously demand domestic manufacturing while refusing to absorb any meaningful share of the early cost of industrialisation." That tension - between the policy ambition for domestic cells and the market's refusal to pay even a small premium for them - runs through every company in this story.
Gourineni's downstream-to-upstream argument holds when licensing is paired with R&D investment that allows the licensee to eventually own the technology. This is what the Korean battery industry did. South Korea's Big Three - LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI, and SK On - spent a combined $2.1 billion on battery R&D in 2024. CATL of China spent $2.58 billion. Samsung SDI began as a licensee of Japanese chemistry; within a decade, it held more battery patents than its former licensor.
The mechanism was not patience alone. It was patience plus sustained, large-scale research investment.
India's conglomerates have adopted the licensing half of the Korean playbook but not the R&D half. Reliance Industries' entire group R&D budget in FY24 - across refining, petrochemicals, telecom, and new energy - was approximately $437 million. CATL's battery-only R&D was nearly six times that. The licences, without the research to absorb and advance them, remain rented capability.
The answer, though, requires honesty about what technology transfer actually transfers. Every conglomerate project building in India relies on Chinese equipment, Chinese technical specialists, and Chinese supply chains. Prof Mitra, who advises several of these companies, frames it plainly:
"If I have something good, I will not transfer it to you, especially when I am producing it. They are maybe giving you the 0th version, and they are working on the fourth version. When you transfer some technology from another country and do not have any R&D in your place, then you are using the inferior technology, the inferior process, to fight against the superior technology. And nobody will sell this technology to you, because they are also using that technology."
Shaligram makes the complementary case from the startup side: "Let us say somebody scaled faster, and it is based on a tech transfer. Do you believe that the tech to actually build that product is going to be transferred?" The technology to build a cell that charges in an hour, he argues, will be transferable. The technology to build one that charges in seven minutes will not.
India needs both models - scale from the conglomerates, capability from the startups. Mitra confirms that a policy conversation about supporting deep-tech cell startups is underway, but the framework remains incipient. "There will be some policy framework for startups to sustain their activity," he says. "Because the startup needs to develop technology that is more efficient than what is current. That is how a startup actually grows."
But Mitra is equally candid about the structural barrier those startups face. "India is still not very sensitive to homegrown technology. They think India cannot maybe produce technology." He pauses. "If I were in the US, one could have done it immediately. But here - who can take the risk of Rs 2,000 crore? If you want to do something new, more efficient, you have to take a risk. That they do not want to do."
Where This Leaves Us
The NEI32140E, sitting on a table in Dobbaspet, works. It is price-competitive. It is manufactured in India by Indian engineers on Indian-designed production lines.
A honeycomb-and-pin electrode prototype, sitting in a 20,000-square-foot lab in Mahadevpura, also works - at bench scale. It was designed in India, by Indian engineers, using machines they built themselves.
Both represent real progress. And both underscore how far India still has to travel. The cell is made here. The electrode is not - at least not yet. The capability to design the next generation of cells, to build the equipment, to formulate the materials, to train the 36,000 process engineers - that capability is being assembled in small labs, small companies, and a handful of research groups. It exists, and more importantly, it is growing. It is just not yet an industry.
India makes cells. It does not yet make the ability to make cells at scale. The distance between those two facts is the distance still to travel - and the reason every company and every lab in this story matters.