Amrit Chandan Lost His Battery Company to Its Cap Table. Then He Built Lorefully to Need No VC at All.
How a Forbes 30 Under 30 climate founder turned a distressing exit into a profitable, six-person AI business with zero institutional venture capital.
On June 27, 2022, Amrit Chandan walked into his office after his first two-week holiday in six years. The chair of Aceleron, the battery company he had co-founded and led for six years, told him the investors wanted him to step aside as CEO. He had 24 hours to decide. It was not framed as a command. It was framed as a choice: step down, or funding would be withdrawn and all 35 employees would lose their jobs.
He agreed. Five weeks later, the investor pushing for the change walked away anyway.
It was like they dropped a brick into the pond, watched the ripples, and then ran away. They didn’t support us when we really needed it.
The man who lost his company this way went on to build the next one so it could never happen again.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The engineer who never wanted to be a founder
Amrit’s drive runs three generations deep. His grandparents migrated from India to Kenya, then to the UK, working three factory jobs at once. His father became an optometrist with his own practice. Amrit, the third generation, returned to risk.
My grandparents worked really hard to make it better for my parents. My parents worked really hard to make it better for us. So what am I doing for the next generation?
He earned a First-Class Honours in Chemistry at Birmingham, top of his class, then hit the 2008 crash and the depersonalised graduate-recruitment machine.
I found the process so inhumane. After doing one application I said, this is not the path for me. I’m going to work out my own path.
A PhD in chemical engineering, a £500 university grant, and a UN scientist who told his research group the world was beyond saving pushed Amrit toward mission instead of fatalism. The product that came out of it was simple to explain. Conventional lithium battery modules are spot-welded and glued, so one dead cell kills the whole unit.
Imagine you’re driving and the tyre bursts. Imagine if that tyre was welded to the car and you couldn’t repair it. You had to throw the whole car away.
Aceleron’s patented compression technology used nuts and bolts, letting modules be opened, serviced, and reused. Amrit calculated the approach could extract up to ten times more value per cell than a welded battery, and the company reached a manual assembly capacity of one megawatt-hour per day with 35 employees.
The right technology, the wrong capital structure
The trap was never the engineering. Aceleron raised over £15 million across seven years from Mercia, the Business Growth Fund, and Toyota Mobility 54, with rounds nearly every year. By the 2022 Series B, Amrit and co-founder Carlton Cummins held roughly 30% combined. He names the structural cause directly.
In the UK the feeling is very much optimizing to reduce downside, not optimizing for maximum return. So they take larger stakes earlier.
That early dilution pre-determined the ending. Asked whether the cap table was the real villain, Amrit pointed deeper.
There are only two types of problems in business. People problems, and problems you don’t yet realize are people problems.
Aceleron entered administration in September 2023, owing around £880,000 to creditors. In April 2024, India’s Advik Hi-Tech, a tier-one auto supplier with roughly $131 million in FY25 revenue, bought the assets and IP. Amrit refuses to call any of it a tragedy.
It was one of the most challenging experiences, but genuinely one of the best gifts I could ever have received. I’d never want to go through it again. But it was a present.
From atoms to bits, and a company that needs no one’s permission
In mid-2024 Amrit founded Lorefully with two former Aceleron colleagues, Barry Diffin and Paul Jennings. The name comes from lore, knowledge passed person to person by word of mouth. The first product, an AI knowledge tool for field engineers, died in enterprise procurement because no multinational has a budget line for “knowledge management.”
The pivot that worked came from a free booth. Lorefully approached the organisers of InstallerSHOW, a UK trade event with over 31,000 attendees, who handed over exhibition space in exchange for a debrief. On the floor, human operators hold consented, structured conversations that AI transcribes and categorises, with human editors reviewing every output. It is research disguised as conversation.
Unlike a survey, where you ask one question and get a response, this is a conversation starter. We come back with a rich data set.
The insight underneath it is what Amrit calls thought equality.
So many people in the room have an informed view who never get the chance to express it in a way where it’s recorded.
The timing fits the market. Event-management software is forecast to grow from $17 billion in 2025 toward $96.5 billion by 2036, while post-event survey response rates sit near 5%. Lorefully occupies the gap as a live, on-floor extraction layer, and the numbers are moving. The company is on track for £500,000 in revenue this calendar year and expects to be profitable this quarter, on roughly £500,000 raised entirely from angels and zero institutional VC. The team is six full-time, supplemented by paid students through its Future Voices Programme, which gives newcomers a structured first rung. The platform has captured over 5.5 million words by May 2026, up from one million in January. Events range from 10 people to 45,000, with a pipeline of more than 100 events in 2026 and a first-of-its-kind National Shipbuilding Office study that gathered 500 structured inputs.
Bigger opportunities in Southeast Asia, with organisers running 500 to 700 events each, would mean turning the internal tool into a self-serve product. When the host suggested funding that through upfront customer payments or debt rather than equity, Amrit did not flinch.
Why would you want to repeat the same mistake twice?
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