Bengaluru Startup Rethinks Battery Design from Scratch

For decades, battery innovation has focused on chemistry while the physical design stayed frozen in time.

e-TRNL Energy decided that was backwards. Founded in 2021 by Apoorv Shaligram and Uttam Kumar Sen, the Bengaluru startup spent three years rebuilding the battery cell from the outside in, rethinking how layers are stacked, wound, and packaged instead of just swapping materials.

The approach targets problems that chemistry alone can't fix. How quickly a battery overheats, how fast it charges safely, how much space gets wasted on packaging, these all flow from architecture, not just what's inside.

Their design works with today's lithium-ion batteries and tomorrow's sodium-ion versions. The company claims it delivers cooler operation, faster charging, longer life, higher energy density, and cheaper manufacturing, earning two patents so far with more pending.

Building a new cell design meant building new machines too. Existing manufacturing equipment was designed for the old architecture, so e-TRNL engineered every piece of production machinery in-house, developing what they call a full-stack approach from cell concept to automated assembly.

In February 2026, they raised ₹27.4 crore (about $3 million) in seed funding led by IAN Alpha Fund. Ather Energy co-founders Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain joined as angel investors alongside Navam Capital, Anicut Capital, and existing backers.

The funding follows a ₹7.5 crore pre-seed round in 2022. Shaligram describes the new capital as a shift from development to demonstration, moving the technology from their 20,000-square-foot Bengaluru facility toward real-world validation.

Why This Inspires

India's energy transition depends on more than adopting batteries designed elsewhere. Building domestic expertise in cell architecture, not just assembly, creates the foundation for energy independence.

The company plans a 250 megawatt-hour pilot plant by 2027, scaling to 2 gigawatt hours later. No independent testing has been released yet, and no customers or revenue figures are public, but the investor backing suggests confidence in the first-principles approach.

After three years of quietly building, e-TRNL is ready to show whether rethinking the fundamentals can unlock progress that incremental chemistry tweaks never could.