Premium EV motorcycle startup Raptee on Thursday said it plans to invest ₹85 crore in its newly opened manufacturing facility in Chennai with a capacity of 1-lakh units per annum.

Announcing the opening of the facility, spread over 3 acres, the ex-Tesla executives-backed company said it will also house a majority of its research and development team. It will serve as the primary production plant for the next 24 months.

“The Chennai factory is expected to roll out the first motorcycle later this year,” the company founded by four engineers from Chennai said.

"This is a huge leap forward for us. We are at an inflection point where we move from a small R&D outfit to becoming a full-blown OEM," Raptee co-founder and CEO Dinesh Arjun said.

The company said the R&D centre will house on-site development and testing facilities and will aid in future products. The plant will have a dedicated battery pack assembly line.

"We have been very particular about having R&D and manufacturing teams in the same campus to improve collaborations in this extremely crucial period for the company and that meant the entire property will need to be inside the city," Arjun said.

Early this year, Raptee received a grant of ₹3.27 crore from the Automotive Research Association of India under the AMTIFs (Advance Mobility Transformation & Innovation Foundation) Industry Accelerator programme as a part of the Capital Goods Scheme by the Ministry of Heavy Industries.

"The facility is big enough to cater to the growing size of our team for the next two years. From a manufacturing capacity standpoint, it also gives us enough flexibility to meet the customer demand from the time of launch," said Jayapradeep Vasudevan, Chief Business Officer at Raptee.

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