How Kazam's Akshay Shekhar Turned the Indian Home Into a Petrol Pump
This conversation with the Kazam CEO on the "positive CAC" model, peer-to-peer energy trading, and the Unified Energy Interface rewiring how India buys and sells power.
Sometime in 2020, a solar rooftop salesman kept meeting the same expression on the utility engineers he pitched. Not boredom, not skepticism. Worry. They had run the numbers on what electric vehicles would do to their transformers, and the arithmetic scared them.
One EV, a four-wheeler on average, consumes three to five times the electricity of your house in one go. And everybody is going to come back at 6 or 7 in the evening and plug their vehicles. So the utility company was getting scared: what’s going on?
That worry is why Kazam exists. Where the engineers saw a threat to the grid, Akshay Shekhar saw the largest new consumer category in India. Not the vehicle, bought once, but the energy, bought every day.
Imagine petrol was available to you in your house, in your tap. You would actually end up filling your vehicle there. Now electricity has come to your house, and your house has become the petrol pump.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
From a YouTube channel to a broken prototype
Most founders in EV infrastructure come from energy or auto. Akshay came from neither. His first venture, FurnishQ, tried to sell IKEA-style flat-pack furniture in a country that, as he puts it, behaves like a “princely state,” where customers want the assembly done for them. It reached about 1.5 million dollars in annual revenue and ended in an acqui-hire, after which he spent time in strategy roles at PepsiCo and Godrej.
So he tested demand before building anything. In September 2020, he launched a YouTube channel reviewing early EVs in Hindi and English, and videos pulled 15,000 to 20,000 organic views each. Then he tested willingness to pay with a single line, “make money from your parking spot,” which drew roughly 20,000 leads and converted about 1,500 in three months, before Ola Electric had even launched. The hook worked because it tapped a specific aspiration, owning a cash-generating petrol pump, in a country where 300 million of 350 million vehicles are two- and three-wheelers.
The first product barely worked; the socket had to be forced in by hand. Akshay took it to Lightning Logistics, a Bengaluru fleet operator, anyway.
I went with that broken device. It was not working, it didn’t even start. But I think I was wearing my good shirt. I don’t know what they liked about me. They ended up giving me an order, because competition was too less.
They ran a proof of concept first, then placed a founding order of 100 units in April 2021, which funded the move into manufacturing. The real problem in those early deployments was not charging but coordination. Depots were packed with vehicles parked back to back, and one overnight security guard did the plugging and unplugging.
At night, the security guard is like the champion of the place. And obviously he’ll make a mistake, he’s a human, so not all vehicles were getting charged fully.
Around 40 percent of vehicles were not fully charged by morning, and simultaneous charging triggered peak-overload penalties. Kazam connected each charger to the cloud over a SIM, wrote load-balancing software to keep total draw within the transformer’s limit, and pinged the guard the moment a vehicle hit full charge. The uncharged rate fell to 5 to 10 percent. That reliability won Kazam the BigBasket dark-store deployment in October 2021, beating Tata Power, a client it still holds.
A business where customers pay to be acquired
Do you call Pine Labs a manufacturing company? They gave POS machines, physical hardware, and eventually became a software company allowing transactions to happen. You make the infrastructure ready, then you manage it, and then you do more with it. That’s the playbook here.
Kazam earns from three streams. Hardware, sold directly and bundled by vehicle OEMs, is still more than 80 percent of revenue at 10 to 12 percent EBITDA margins. Software subscriptions, at 300 to 500 rupees per asset per month, are about 15 percent. Transaction and energy-trading fees make up the remaining 5 percent. The hardware is not the profit centre; it is the distribution mechanism, which produces an unusual result.
My CAC has become positive. Imagine that. People are paying me to be my consumers, by buying the hardware.
The instinct is inherited. Akshay’s family built M-Swipe and Prism Payments, businesses that placed physical terminals to capture long-term software and transaction fees.
Dhanda runs in the blood. Conversations on the dining table have always been around business. There is this rule of running a business for at least three or four years before you actually start seeing profits.
Energy as UPI
Once energy is digitised, charging is the first application, not the product. The bigger prize is a market for electrons. Time-of-day tariffs, now piloted in several states, let a driver shift charging to off-peak hours and cut a monthly bill by 20 to 30 percent. That matters because of a waste few people see: base-load thermal plants cannot be throttled, so at night, when demand collapses, the surplus has nowhere to go.
A power plant is like an open tap, or a river. You can’t just switch it off. If you have a bucket underneath it, you are collecting it. If you’re not, the bucket overflows, and you put all that energy into the earth. Seriously, into the earth.
The next layer is peer-to-peer trading, where a rooftop-solar household sells surplus credits to a neighbour and Kazam takes a margin as broker. Beyond that is vehicle-to-grid, the car battery selling power back at peak prices.
UPI unlocked one-rupee transactions without me adding a beneficiary. This is going to unlock the same, where you can now trade the electricity from your home with anyone.
The rails are being laid through the Unified Energy Interface and India Energy Stack, mentored by Nandan Nilekani and driven by the Ministry of Power with REC as nodal agency. It is, in effect, an ONDC for electricity, and Kazam is a founding member.
Where Kazam stands, and why it works
Revenue rose from 1.5 million dollars in FY24 to about 6 million dollars, or 40 crore rupees, in FY25, roughly a 3.5-times jump, and Kazam is guiding to a 100 crore rupee run-rate and profitability. In June 2025 it closed a 6.2 million dollar Series B led by the IFC, part of the World Bank Group, with Vertex Ventures SEA and India and Avaana Capital, taking total capital raised to 19.2 million dollars across five rounds.
By early 2026, Kazam had integrated more than 120,000 chargers and run over 7 million sessions, a 76 percent rise in six months, with about 150,000 three-wheeler drivers on its platform. It works with more than 14 OEMs, including Maruti Suzuki, alongside ONGC, 150-plus resident welfare associations and 45 bus depots. It helped shape India’s IS-17017 charging standards for light EVs, became one of the first networks to show two-wheeler charging on Google Maps, and has begun expanding into Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.
The durable position in this shift is not the vehicle brand that grabs headlines but the layer beneath it that also owns the software and the payments. Akshay built it the way a second-time founder does, knowing when to call a stop-loss and how to sequence the asset before the software. The petrol pump has moved into the home, and Kazam is betting that whoever owns that gateway owns a real share of the next decade of Indian energy.
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Until next time,
Your Host,
Akshay Datt