Every electric scooter, auto-rickshaw and delivery three-wheeler on Indian roads has a motor at its heart — and for years, most of those motors arrived from somewhere else, designed for someone else’s roads, someone else’s dust, someone else’s heat. In Ahmedabad, a company called Naxatra Labs decided that the motor itself was the problem worth solving. Its answer is a complete powertrain — motor and controller, designed together, built together, tested together — engineered in India for the way India actually drives.
Naxatra Labs began in 2021, founded by Abhilash Maurya, Arnav Biswas and Piyush Verma, with a mission that started in the sky: hybrid drones. When the team went looking for a small axial flux motor for an electric cycle and could not find one to buy, they built their own. That first 250-watt motor became the seed of a company that now designs and manufactures high-efficiency motors and controllers for electric vehicles, farm equipment, power tools and drones, all from its own factory in Ahmedabad.
Two motor families, one tuned pair
Naxatra builds two motor families, and the reason is simple: no single design fits every job. The Antarix RF line of radial flux motors powers electric scooters and motorcycles, from 2.2 to 5.5 kilowatts, while the AF line of axial flux motors serves three-wheelers and industrial applications, with efficiency above 94 percent. Across the range, from under one kilowatt to 15 kilowatts, every motor ships with a controller from the same stable — because, as the company puts it, a motor bought from one place and a controller from another leaves efficiency on the table. Nobody tuned them to each other.
The choice between the two families comes down to the job. Axial flux motors are lighter, shorter and denser in torque, so they win where weight and performance matter most. Radial flux motors win on value, with a supply chain and manufacturing ecosystem built over decades. Naxatra does both, and the platform approach means an OEM can start with a standard variant and then go deeper — different stack length, different winding, a custom shaft and mounting, controller calibration matched to the vehicle’s real duty cycle rather than a generic one.
Built in-house, built for India
Everything about a Naxatra motor happens under one roof in Ahmedabad: the electromagnetic design, the winding, the rotor-magnet assembly, the final assembly and the end-of-line testing. The company keeps those steps in-house deliberately, because that is where quality is won or lost, and it has localised most of its supply chain around them. The designs were built from the start around heavy-rare-earth-free magnet grades, with multiple qualified sources across geographies, so no single country’s supply can stall a production line.
The motors are tuned for Indian conditions in the most literal sense — dust, heat, load cycles and road quality, the way vehicles are actually used here rather than the way they are tested elsewhere. Agricultural motors are field-tested for mud and water ingress with IP67 protection, power-tool motors are compact and shock-resistant, and drone motors are built for endurance and light weight. The platform has cleared type-approval testing at NATRAX, India’s automotive testing track, under AIS norms, and the company says it holds granted intellectual property on its motor designs.
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From the workshop to the road
Naxatra’s motors are already running in the field with paying customers across two-wheelers, three-wheelers, agriculture and industry, with multiple OEM programmes at different stages — some in series production, some at bench evaluation, some already in vehicle-level testing. The company’s Ahmedabad facility has capacity for 50,000 motors today and is scaling towards 500,000 a year by 2028, after a second production unit was inaugurated in August 2025.
The momentum has drawn serious backing. In December 2025 Naxatra Labs raised $3 million in a pre-Series A round led by Rainmatter, Zerodha’s investment arm, with participation from the founders of Delhivery, Paytm and ixigo, among others. Earlier, the company won grants from NIDHI-PRAYAS, MeitY’s TIDE programme and the Startup India Seed Fund. In 2026 the company cleared its NATRAX certification and launched a drone motor range, taking its motion technology from the road into the sky — and its aviation motors, first developed in 2024, point the same way.
Watch Naxatra Labs’ brand film:
A motor is a small thing to build a company on — until you remember that every electric vehicle India makes will need one, and that the country that builds its own motors keeps the engineering, the jobs and the know-how at home. From a workshop in Ahmedabad, Naxatra Labs is making sure the heart of India’s electric future beats with Indian engineering.
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