
The Two Dropouts Who Spent a Decade Building a Battery Nobody Believed In: How Gegadyne Energy Just Launched a Lithium-Free Power Pack That Charges in Minutes—and Is Already on European Factory Floors
In 2014, two mechatronics engineering students at Mumbai's Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies set out to build an electric vehicle for their final-year project. Jubin Varghese was a car enthusiast. Ameya Gadiwan was a hard-tech tinkerer. Together, they combed through Mumbai's junkyards, collecting spare parts, convinced that they could assemble a working EV from the discarded remnants of the internal-combustion age. They built the chassis. They built the drivetrain. And then they discovered that the battery required to power their creation would cost three times as much as everything else combined. They dropped out of college soon after and started Gegadyne Energy in 2015. They began with lead-acid batteries, which were cheap but charged painfully slowly. They switched to lithium-ion, which charged faster but degraded with every cycle. They experimented with supercapacitors—quick to charge, long-lasting, but low on energy density. Nothing worked. "There was scope to build incremental battery tech instead of creating something from scratch," Varghese said. "Since India doesn't have an established battery supply chain, we decided to work on materials that are widely available in nature."








