Magna Doubles Down on Yuma Energy With $35 Million to Scale India's Battery-Swapping Network

Yuma Energy has picked up $35 million in a Series A round from Magna International, the Canadian automotive supplier that co-founded the battery-swapping venture in the first place. The announcement landed on September 1, and it isn't Magna's first bet on Yuma — it's a second, larger one.

From joint venture to reinvestment

Yuma was set up in 2023 as a joint venture between Magna and Yulu, the Bengaluru electric-mobility platform, with Magna taking a 51% stake at formation. This round increases that stake further, with Magna itself supplying the capital rather than bringing in a new lead investor — an unusual structure for what's being described publicly as a Series A, but one that signals the strategic parent is prepared to fund Yuma's next phase directly rather than wait for outside capital to validate the business first.

That matters because Magna is not a financial investor dabbling in Indian mobility — it is one of the world's largest automotive suppliers, with deep relationships across the OEM ecosystem that Yuma is trying to sell into.

The scale Yuma has already built

By the time of this raise, Yuma says its network has delivered more than 60 million battery swaps using upward of 100,000 batteries, spread across more than 2,500 charging units and 400-plus touchpoints in 18 Indian cities. The battery-as-a-service model lets electric two-wheeler, three-wheeler and last-mile delivery riders swap a depleted battery for a charged one in minutes rather than waiting out a charge cycle — a proposition aimed squarely at commercial and gig-economy riders for whom vehicle downtime is a direct hit to earnings.

That is a meaningfully larger footprint than Yuma had even a year earlier, and the company has been adding partnerships to match — including a tie-up with state-run fuel retailer HPCL to place swap stations at fuel outlets, a distribution advantage few standalone battery-swapping startups can match.

What the new capital is for

Yuma says the fresh $35 million will go toward three things: expanding the physical swapping network further, broadening its customer base beyond individual EV riders to include fleet operators and OEM partners directly, and pushing the business toward EBITDA-positive operations by FY27. That last target is the more telling one — it signals Yuma and Magna see the network as approaching the density at which battery-swapping economics (which depend heavily on utilisation per station) start to work, rather than requiring indefinite subsidy.

Why battery swapping, and why now

India's EV two- and three-wheeler market has largely bet on plug-in charging, but battery swapping has persisted as a parallel model for commercial fleets and delivery riders, where minutes of downtime compound into real income loss across a working day. Yuma's approach — owning the batteries and charging infrastructure as a service, rather than requiring riders to own a battery outright — lowers the upfront cost of going electric for gig workers, a segment Indian delivery and ride-hailing platforms have been pushing to electrify for cost and emissions reasons alike.

Battery swapping has had a mixed track record globally — China's NIO remains the most visible large-scale operator, running roughly 2,250 stations for passenger cars — but the economics look different for India's two- and three-wheeler commercial fleets, where battery packs are smaller, cheaper to standardise across vehicle models, and swap infrastructure can be sited more densely at lower capital cost per station.

For Magna, the reinvestment extends a broader pattern of the auto-parts giant treating India as more than a manufacturing base for export — it is underwriting infrastructure for the market's own EV transition, with Yuma as its vehicle for that bet. Whether the model reaches the EBITDA-positive milestone Yuma has now set for FY27 will be the clearest signal yet of whether battery-as-a-service can work as a standalone business in India, rather than as a subsidised feature bundled into fleet operations.

Sources

• Yuma Energy raises $35M in Series A from Magna International — YourStory
• India: Yuma Energy raises $35m Series A from Magna International — DealStreetAsia
• Yuma Energy raises $35M from Magna to expand battery swapping network across India — Dealroom.co
• Magna increases bet on battery swapping in India with $35M for Yuma — TechCrunch