Built Without Millions: How Mechlae Engineered the Impossible with Just Two Grants and One Small CCD Fund.
EV Solution wasn’t just a buzzword for us it was our mission. While others saw it as a future goal, we treated it as a present necessity. Hardware startups need huge capital to innovate.” That’s what everyone says. And maybe they’re right for startups that chase comfort, not conviction. But at Mechlae Energy, we never had the luxury of waiting for a cheque to chase our vision. We didn’t have millions in funding. We had something far more powerful: belief, skill, and sheer willpower. Our journey didn’t start in a lab or a boardroom it started in a workshop, with a dropout who once worked as a mechanic, fixing broken engines and learning from the ground up. While the world around us believed that hardware innovation was only possible with massive R&D budgets, we quietly built what others couldn’t. With just ₹45 lakhs in hand, we created the world’s first portable battery swap station a real, working system tested in the chaos of Indian streets, not just a concept sitting pretty in pitch decks.
We designed it for last-mile fleets, for delivery riders, for the everyday warrior who can’t afford to wait hours to charge. Our swap station was compact, rugged, and plug-and-play built not just for performance, but for real-world deployment.
But we didn’t stop there. Because the moment we launched the swap station, another challenge stared us down:
How do you make the battery smarter, lighter, cooler literally? And that’s when we built the world’s first immersive-cooled, swappable 2kWh battery pack, weighing just 14kg, wrapped in a lightweight, high-durability plastic shell. No fire risk. No thermal runaway. No downtime. Just plug, swap, and go. While billion-dollar companies were still running lab simulations, our team was soldering boards till 2 a.m., replacing blown fuses, iterating cooling designs, and heat-testing our packs under full load again and again, until it worked. Not once. But every time. Because this team the Mechlae Force doesn’t ask for permission to build. They just build.They’ve seen each other break through breakdowns, push through failures, and keep going not because they were told to but because they deeply believed this EV solution needed to exist. What we’ve created at Mechlae isn’t just a battery or a station. It’s a proof of possibility that a world-class EV solution can come out of India, even without venture capital, even without an IIT tag, even without global labs. This is not luck. This is not a fluke. This is what happens when a team of underdogs refuses to stop when the impossible meets the unstoppable.
So the next time someone tells you, “hardware needs huge money to build,” just show them what Mechlae did with ₹45 lakhs, relentless passion, and a team that turned fire risks into fireproof solutions. We didn’t wait for the world to believe in us. We believed in ourselves and built a future the world can now believe in too.