Brands
Battery Smart clocks 100 million EV battery swaps, launches Rs 10 crore driver fund
GURUGRAM: Battery Smart has crossed a landmark few in India’s electric-mobility race: 100 million battery swaps. The five-year-old company is the first in the country to do so, cementing battery swapping as a serious alternative to plugs, queues and downtime.
The numbers are chunky. Those swaps have powered 3.5 billion clean kilometres, avoided 237,000 tonnes of CO₂e and saved the equivalent of 233 million litres of fuel. Battery Smart now runs an estimated 70 per cent of India’s battery-swapping infrastructure, spanning two- and three-wheelers across the country.
To mark the milestone, the company unveiled a Rs 10 crore Driver Welfare Fund 2026, aimed at bolstering insurance cover, rewards, free swaps, skill-building and community programmes for roughly 1 lakh EV drivers. Since launch, the platform has enabled cumulative driver earnings of more than Rs 2,800 crores.
“Crossing 100 million swaps shows that clean mobility can be affordable, accessible and scalable in India,” said Pulkit Khurana and Siddharth Sikka, co-founders of Battery Smart. “Every swap is a driver choosing uptime over waiting, assurance over anxiety. This milestone belongs to the drivers, partners, OEMs, investors and policymakers who believed battery swapping could work at scale.”
Battery Smart’s network runs on IoT-enabled batteries and real-time monitoring, allowing predictive maintenance and high uptime—crucial in a gig economy where idle hours cost money. The ecosystem is notably inclusive, with more than 5,000 women drivers and over 250 women partners.
Founded in 2019 by the IIT Kanpur alumni, the company has built 1,600-plus swap stations, serves over 100,000 drivers and operates in more than 50 cities. By 2026 it plans to enter 100 additional cities, roll out thousands of new stations and scale daily swaps sharply as commercial EV demand accelerates.
More stations, smarter batteries, tougher safety systems—and a bigger safety net for drivers. Battery Smart is not just swapping batteries any more; it is swapping the rules of India’s EV game.
Brands
Godrej clarifies ‘GI’ identifier after logo similarity debate
Says GI is not a logo, will not replace Godrej signature across products.
MUMBAI: In a branding storm where shapes did the talking, Godrej is now spelling things out. Godrej Industries Group (GIG) has issued a clarification on its newly introduced ‘GI’ identifier, addressing questions around its purpose and design following a wave of online criticism. At the centre of the debate were two concerns: whether the new mark replaces the long-standing Godrej logo, and whether its geometric design mirrors other corporate identities.
The company has drawn a clear line. The Godrej signature logo, it said, remains unchanged and continues to be the sole logo across all consumer-facing products and services. The ‘GI’ mark, by contrast, is not a logo but a corporate group identifier intended for use alongside the Godrej signature or company name, and aimed at stakeholders such as investors, media and talent rather than consumers.
The need for such a distinction stems from the 2024 restructuring of the broader Godrej Group into two separate business entities. With both continuing to operate under the same Godrej name and signature, the identifier is positioned as a way to differentiate the Godrej Industries Group at a corporate level.
The rollout, however, triggered a broader conversation on design originality. Critics pointed to similarities between the GI mark’s geometric composition and logos used by companies globally, raising questions about distinctiveness.
Responding to this, GIG said its intellectual property and legal review found that such overlaps are common in minimalist, geometry-led design systems. Basic forms such as circles and rectangles appear across dozens of brand identities worldwide, the company noted.
It added that the identifier emerged from an extensive design process and was chosen for its simplicity, allowing it to sit alongside the Godrej signature without competing visually. While acknowledging that elemental shapes may appear less distinctive in isolation, the group emphasised that the mark is part of a broader identity system that includes a custom typeface, sonic branding and other proprietary elements.
Following legal and ethical assessments, the company said it found no impediment to using the identifier, reiterating that the GI mark is a corporate tool not a consumer-facing symbol.
In short, the logo isn’t changing but the conversation around it certainly has.
