CHARGE+ZONE: The India EV-Infrastructure Warrant in Our Newchip Portfolio

Roughly one out of every three vehicles sold in the world in 2030 is going to be electric. Most of the venture-scale opportunity in that transition has quietly shifted from the vehicles themselves to the infrastructure required to keep them moving. That's where CHARGE+ZONE sits — and it's another warrant we hold via the Newchip portfolio in the Frontier Alternatives Fund.

CHARGE+ZONE is a Vadodara, Gujarat-based EV charging platform, founded in 2018 by Kartikey Hariyani and Pavan Bakeri. Over the past three years the company has quietly grown into India's largest EV charging network — roughly 14,000-15,000 charging points across 37+ cities, with high-speed corridors covering more than 40,000 kilometers of highway. In Hariyani's own framing, you can drive from Amritsar to Chennai on their network without a range-anxiety gap.

Where the capital came from

CHARGE+ZONE's cap table is unusually institutional for a South Asian venture-stage story. In March 2023, the company closed a $54M Series A1 led by BlueOrchard Finance (Schroders' impact-investment arm), with $8M of that in debt. In December 2023, Macquarie Capital took a minority strategic position to accelerate the cloud-technology-enabled charging network. In May 2024, the UK's development finance institution, British International Investment, added $19M. Earlier institutional backers include Venture Catalysts and Mumbai Angels.

The founder describes the company as the only Indian charge-point operator backed by two large private equity funds each managing more than $1T in AUM. Roughly $67-73M has been raised to date across equity and debt, with a further $75-125M Series A2 signaled to institutional investors. Approximately $50-57M in capex has already been deployed into the operating network.

The operating story

What makes CHARGE+ZONE unusual for a hardware-heavy infrastructure play is its unit economics discipline. The company has already achieved EBITDA-positive status and is targeting PAT profitability as capacity utilization scales from the current ~13.5% toward a 20-25% inflection. Highway station utilization is already above 6%, urban fleet-charging hubs 18-25%, and Hariyani cites 10-15% month-on-month energy consumption growth on the network from February 2025 onward.

The revenue picture:

• Reported ~$15M revenue base scaling into a $24-30M ARR at the time of latest capital raise commentary
• 2-3x annual growth trajectory in FY26
• Retail customer cost of charging on the CHARGE+ZONE network runs 70-80% below the OPEX cost of a comparable internal-combustion vehicle in India
• Network mix now spans four-wheelers, buses, trucks, and enterprise fleet accounts

The mission target has been consistent since 2018 — 100,000 charging points across India by 2030, with cars, buses, and trucks all served on the same infrastructure. On current pace, that ambition is starting to look reachable rather than aspirational.

Why this warrant fits the framework

Three reasons CHARGE+ZONE profiles as a Newchip warrant our desk keeps on the shortlist for closer monitoring:

1. Category is structurally the right side of the trade. India's EV charging capex opportunity is roughly $10B by Hariyani's own math — 300,000+ stations required if the country hits 30% EV penetration by 2030. Current cumulative CPO investment across every operator combined sits under $200M. That gap is the entire investment thesis.

2. Institutional cap table de-risks the equity story. When Macquarie, BlueOrchard, and BII all sit on the same cap table alongside domestic angel and VC backers, follow-on capital is unusually well-provisioned for a category that historically starves for growth-stage rounds. That matters for warrant survivability.

3. Category adjacency to names we already track. EV infrastructure is a natural extension of the physical-AI, autonomous-systems, and industrial-electrification thesis we cover across our AI robotics coverage and portions of our pre-IPO watchlist. Charging networks are the pick-and-shovel layer under the entire mobility-electrification stack.

What we're watching

The near-term milestones our research desk is tracking on CHARGE+ZONE:

• Closure and terms of the Series A2 round — signal both on valuation reset and on international investor appetite for Indian infrastructure equity
• Progress on the 20-25% utilization inflection required for PAT-positive operations at scale
• Expansion of the truck and long-haul commercial charging network, which is the highest-throughput and highest-margin segment
• Franchise-program capital dynamics — Hariyani has framed the franchise channel as a third source of growth capital layered on top of equity and debt
• Regulatory posture on demand charges, which remains a live cost-structure risk for every CPO in the Indian market

Position before you predict. CHARGE+ZONE is a Newchip warrant we're watching closely as India's EV charging infrastructure enters its capex-heavy scaling phase.