Manav Bansal spent twenty years being told the job was to accept failure. Venture capital runs on it, backing ten founders and expecting three or four to die so one outlier pays for the rest. As CEO of Neev Funds, a UK backed private equity vehicle, he ran two fund cycles worth ₹1,700 crore without losing money on an investment.
We did not lose money in a single investment, so there is no fatality.
In 2025, Bansal left a $3 billion mandate as Managing Director and Head of India at British International Investment to co-found Drivn Transition Private Limited, a Gurugram platform leasing electric buses and 55 tonne trucks to Indian fleet operators. Four months later, Drivn secured up to $80 million from Nomura, largely senior secured debt with an equity component. No fleet was on the road, no revenue existed, just a plan and a philosophy that treats capital loss as design failure.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
Who is Manav Bansal, and why did he leave BII to found Drivn?
Bansal is a civil engineer from Jamia Millia Islamia University with an MBA from MDI, and spent two decades at KPMG and PwC before private equity. At Neev Funds, his portfolio included Blue Planet, co-founded by future Drivn co-founder Madhujeet Chimni when it was three people and a slide deck, now valued close to a billion dollars, by his account. He frames leaving BII not as risk taking, but as risk disappearing with age and prior success.
After a certain age, the risk of risks become a bit lower. The inherent insecurity goes away when you reach a certain station in your life, and therefore your ability to take some risks becomes easier.
What does Drivn do, and why intercity buses and heavy trucks?
Drivn buys electric buses and heavy trucks and leases them to operators running India’s intercity routes, a segment that has lagged the two and three wheelers dominating India’s EV story. Electric truck sales globally crossed 400,000 units in 2023, a 9% share of all truck sales, per IEA data.
An intercity electric bus costs roughly ₹1.5 crore, nearly double diesel, a gap operators cannot absorb upfront. Drivn absorbs that cost instead, structured as an AssetCo rather than an NBFC.
We did not go the NBFC route. The final reason is the access to capital. We found it easier if we remain an AssetCo.
An NBFC borrows against its own balance sheet and needs seasoning cycles for competitive pricing. An AssetCo borrows against the vehicle and the lease’s cash flow, a far better loan to value ratio from day one.
How did Drivn raise $80 million at the idea stage?
First you have to believe. And once you believe, then you plan. You go to a level of planning that should do yourself and the people you’re talking to proud.
Bansal and co-founders signed office leases before approvals came through, dismissive of founders who treat dilution as the scoreboard of success.
The fear of dilution is overrated. I’ve met so many founders who think, well, we’ve diluted so much, do we have control left. I think that’s an overblown fear.
The capital funds Phase 1, roughly 1,000 electric buses and trucks by Q4 FY27.
What do the numbers actually say?
When the cost economics of electric mobility is higher than diesel, that clearly is a secular trend that you need to ride.
A diesel intercity bus costs roughly ₹50 per kilometre to run, versus about ₹35 for electric including battery amortisation, a ₹15 saving worth ₹30 lakh a year at 2,00,000 km, against a ₹70 to ₹75 lakh upfront premium, a payback of about two and a half years. The ₹35 breaks down to roughly ₹5 to ₹6 per km in battery cost and ₹10 in charging, the rest at parity with diesel on wages, tolls, and maintenance. The math excludes subsidy, though the tailwind is real: the PM E-DRIVE scheme carries a ₹10,900 crore outlay through March 2028, and India already has annual capacity to build over 40,500 electric buses, so the constraint is financing demand, not supply.
Scale also favours bigger form factors: a three wheeler costs roughly ₹3 lakh against ₹1.5 crore for a bus, but the bus means one client instead of thirty drivers.
Instead of 1,500 clients, you have one client. Your ability to manage and track the asset becomes so much better, and your operating costs become so much lower.
What is Drivn’s moat against bigger rivals?
Bansal does not claim Drivn is safe from bigger rivals; his answer is that capital cannot buy historical operating data. Drivn has put roughly $2 million into an AI and telemetry layer tracking close to 700 real time parameters per vehicle across 91 live routes.
EVs are born with data. We collect about 700 data points, and at any point in time we know exactly the state of health of the vehicle.
That data enables “sculpted leases” that flex with seasonal cash flow, and produces insights like finding it cheaper on some routes for a truck to return empty than wait for a partial load, a roughly 15% efficiency gain.
Drivn is targeting an AUM of ₹1,000 to ₹1,200 crore by December and a $1 billion, 6,000 to 7,000 vehicle portfolio within five to six years.
The team building it
Heavy trucking and bus finance is a male dominated corner of Indian logistics. Drivn’s bench is not: alongside Jain as CBO, the Chief Credit Officer and VP of Business Solutioning are both women, and an independent board seat is held by a climate finance veteran, fitting for a company betting $80 million on running heavy asset lending with zero fatalities.
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Akshay Datt
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