Indian electric motorcycle maker Ultraviolette has spent the last few years building some genuinely interesting machines while those of us in other parts of the world just stared at them through a screen. That arrangement apparently has an expiration date. The company is now targeting a US launch in 2027, and it’s heading stateside with considerably more money, manufacturing capacity, and tech-industry firepower than it had before.
Ultraviolette just raised $85 million in fresh funding led by Yali Capital and TDK Ventures, with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan also investing personally. Tan, who also chairs investment firm Walden International, is joining Ultraviolette as an adviser. So yes, the guy currently running Intel has put his own money behind an Indian electric motorcycle company and will now have a seat close enough to the table to offer advice. That's not exactly your average motorcycle-industry funding announcement.
The cash is going toward scaling production of Ultraviolette's existing F77 and X-47 electric motorcycles, launching the upcoming Tesseract scooter and Shockwave enduro, and developing another generation of EV platforms. Ultraviolette says its in-house work already covers batteries, power electronics, vehicle architecture, and software, with battery systems spanning architectures from 48 to 400 volts.
More importantly, Ultraviolette says it wants to enter the US in 2027. The company already sells bikes in India and across 20 European countries, while Latin America and Southeast Asia are also on its expansion list. That makes America less of a vague someday-maybe ambition and more of another step in an international rollout that is already underway.
Of course, wanting to sell motorcycles in America and actually doing it are very different things. Regulatory approval, distribution, servicing, parts support, pricing, and convincing Americans to buy electric motorcycles all come with their own collection of headaches. Ultraviolette will need more than cool bodywork and impressive spec sheets if it wants to survive here.
It is, however, preparing to build at a much larger scale. The company recently announced a new manufacturing facility in India that could eventually support annual production of up to 500,000 vehicles, although that's planned capacity rather than current output. Reuters has reported that Ultraviolette intends to invest roughly $81 million in the plant as it expands into higher-volume products.
That’s what makes this announcement worth paying attention to. Ultraviolette isn’t merely saying Americans might get its motorcycles someday. It has named 2027, raised another $85 million, recruited one of the semiconductor industry's biggest names as an adviser, and is building the factory capacity needed to support a much larger business.
Now it just has to actually bring its EV motorcycles stateside.
