There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has ever owned a smartphone or an electric vehicle, when the relationship with technology shifts from convenience to anxiety. It happens when the battery icon turns red. When the charging bar seems frozen. When you realize that every quick charge you’ve ever used has slowly, silently, been killing the device in your hands.
A small team of engineers in Bengaluru believes they have found a way to make that moment disappear.
E-Trnl Energy, a battery technology startup founded in 2021, has just raised ₹27.4 crore—roughly $3.2 million USD—to complete development on a new kind of battery cell that could change how Americans charge their phones, drive their EVs, and think about energy storage. The funding round was led by IAN Alpha Fund, with participation from Navam Capital and Speciale Invest, and included backing from the co-founders of Ather Energy, one of India’s most successful electric vehicle companies.
To understand why this matters in the United States, you have to understand the fundamental problem with every lithium-ion battery currently powering American life. Whether it’s a Tesla on the highway or an iPhone in a pocket, the battery inside is essentially a scaled-up version of the same technology that powered early laptops. It was never really designed for the demands we place on it today.
“When you fast-charge a phone or an EV, the battery heats up,” explains Apoorv Shaligram, co-founder and CEO of E-Trnl Energy. “That heat is wasted energy. And over time, it degrades the battery. It’s the reason your phone doesn’t hold a charge after two years.”
Shaligram, who earned his undergraduate degree at IIT Roorkee before completing a master’s at Michigan State University, started the company with Dr. Uttam Kumar Sen, a materials scientist. Their insight was deceptively simple: stop the heat before it starts. In conventional batteries, electrons travel a long, winding path inside the cell. Think of it like rush hour traffic on a narrow two-lane road—everything slows down, engines overheat, energy is wasted. E-Trnl redesigned the geometry of the cell itself, shortening the distance electrons have to travel and widening the path. The company calls it 3DEA technology.
“If you take the shortest route, you have the least possible heating,” Shaligram says.
The result, they claim, is a battery that can charge faster, run cooler, and last significantly longer than the cells currently on the market. Because the technology works with existing lithium-ion chemistry, it could be adopted without waiting for a complete overhaul of global manufacturing. And because the company has designed its own production machinery in-house, it isn’t reliant on foreign suppliers—a lesson in supply chain resilience that American manufacturers have only recently begun to learn.
For the average American consumer, the implications are tangible. Range anxiety in electric vehicles isn’t just about how far a car can go; it’s about how long it takes to get back on the road. It’s about the fear that repeated fast charging will degrade the battery and reduce the vehicle’s resale value. E-Trnl’s technology, if it scales, addresses all of those anxieties at once.
The company has already been granted two patents for its cell design and has filed several more. It operates a 20,000-square-foot research and development facility in Bengaluru. With the new funding, it plans to establish a pilot manufacturing line capable of producing 250 megawatt-hours of cells per year by 2027, eventually scaling to two gigawatt-hours. To put that in perspective, two gigawatt-hours is enough to power roughly 60,000 average electric vehicles annually.
The first product will be based on LFP chemistry—the same stable, long-life chemistry that Tesla has adopted for its standard-range vehicles. From there, the company plans to expand into higher-energy chemistries and eventually sodium-ion cells, which could offer a cheaper alternative to lithium. The technology is designed to adapt as the industry evolves.
There is a broader story here about where the next generation of battery innovation is coming from. The United States has spent years trying to build a domestic supply chain for batteries, largely to reduce dependence on China. But innovation is not confined by borders. E-Trnl represents a growing wave of Indian deep-tech startups building intellectual property from the ground up, designing not just products but the machines that make them.
For Shaligram and Sen, the goal is simpler. They want the technology to fade into the background. They want drivers to stop calculating charging stops. They want phone users to stop worrying about battery health.
“We want to eliminate range anxiety,” Shaligram says. “Not by building bigger batteries, but by building batteries that you don’t have to worry about. You charge fast, you drive, you live your life. The battery just works.”
In a world where everyone is tethered to devices that demand constant feeding, that vision has a certain quiet appeal. Whether E-Trnl can deliver on its promise remains to be seen. But for the first time in a long time, someone is asking not just how to store more energy, but how to stop wasting the energy we already have. And that is a question that matters everywhere.
