Evate: Green Vehicle Financing

This post is a part of the Early Stage Climate Startup series from Climafix 2024

Highlights

A platform that is designed to support low-income and underbanked individuals (5% for leases, 7% for loans), with a Green Vehicle Financing model that helps reduce transport-related GHG emissions.
Making clean vehicle ownership more accessible.

Evate offers a solution by providing affordable and accessible financing options for individuals and businesses to purchase green commercial vehicles EVs, fuel cell vehicles, hybrids, and CNG-powered vehicles.
The platform is designed to support low-income and underbanked individuals such as taxi drivers, goods vehicle operators, and delivery bikers, with a lower down payment requirement of just 5-7%.

Limited Credit Access: Many gig-driving individuals have difficulty securing loans due to low or nonexistent credit histories. Traditional financial institutions often reject their applications. Evate uses alternative underwriting models that consider driver logs, map data, digital footprints, and behavioral analysis to assess creditworthiness, making financing more inclusive for underbanked drivers.
High Loan Repayment Burden: Traditional loans with monthly repayment schedules often don’t align with the daily income patterns of commercial drivers. Evate solves this by offering daily repayment plans with weekly rest periods.
High Upfront Costs: Purchasing a vehicle typically requires a significant down payment, which can be a barrier for drivers with limited savings. Evate minimizes this barrier by offering lower down payments 5% for leases and 7% for loans.

Increasing Adoption & Reducing Fossil Fuel Dependency: Through financing options for electric and fuel-efficient vehicles, Evate helps reduce reliance on traditional fuel-powered vehicles.

Current Target Segments: Individuals and small businesses whose livelihoods depend on driving. This includes taxi drivers, goods vehicle operators, auto drivers, and delivery bikers.
Future Target Segments: Expanding its services to a broader range of green vehicles, fleet operators, ride-hailing companies, and logistics businesses.

Alternative Credit Assessments: Evate’s use of driver logs, telematics data, and digital behavior analysis allows it to make better-informed underwriting decisions.
Seamless Digital Collections: Evate operates a fully digital collections process using the UPI payments stack, ensuring that all loan and lease payments are processed efficiently.

Vijay H. Madhusudhan & Amit Shahani (Co-Founders): bring decades of experience in climate finance, asset management, and technology innovation. With experience in organizations like SLB, the team combines technical expertise with a deep understanding of the challenges facing commercial vehicle drivers.