Founder Interview: Monil Khatri On Building Milo Drive

Monil Khatri is a mechanical engineer whose career, as he tells it, looks far more logical in hindsight than it felt at the time. It runs from the Tata Group to Invest India to BluSmart, where he helped build electric mobility operations in Bengaluru and Dubai. Today he is Co-Founder and CEO of Milo Drive, which he is building with Vishal Jewrajka. It is his second venture; his first, in agritech, is a chapter he declines to treat as a badge.

Milo works in the part of mobility most passengers never see: the drivers, individual vehicle owners and small fleet operators who run the cars. Operating across Bengaluru and Gurgaon, it connects vehicle access, multiple demand channels, fleet operations, charging intelligence and technology through its operating platforms. Monil says the company has grown from a small beginning to hundreds of vehicles and has crossed a million rides.

In this edited conversation, he talks about what it takes to build twice, why a car on a spreadsheet is never just an asset, and the larger bet he is making on India’s next generation of mobility entrepreneurs. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Founder Journey

Before Milo Drive, you worked with Invest India and BluSmart. How did these experiences shape your understanding of India’s mobility challenges?

When I look back, there seems to be a very logical progression to my career. Mechanical engineering, the Tata Group, Invest India, BluSmart and eventually Milo Drive. But I can tell you, it certainly didn’t feel that well planned while I was living through it.

At the Tata Group, I had the opportunity to observe Mr. Ratan Tata’s approach to leadership. What stayed with me was the difference between building a successful business and building something that could become an institution. Invest India opened up an entirely different perspective. You’re looking at India from 30,000 feet. Then came BluSmart, and suddenly, everything was happening at ground level.

When you’re involved in launching and scaling electric mobility operations in places like Bengaluru and Dubai, you realize how easily a perfectly sensible plan can fall apart in execution. A car isn’t available. A driver hasn’t reported. Charging takes longer than expected. Demand arrives where your vehicles aren’t. Something that looked straightforward in Excel turns out to involve six different people and three different problems.

But I also began noticing something. We were investing enormous amounts of money and intelligence into making mobility convenient for passengers. The ecosystem behind that passenger experience, the drivers, individual vehicle owners, small fleet operators, was still extraordinarily fragmented. There were good businesses being built around pieces of the problem. But the pieces weren’t talking to each other enough.

I didn’t want to spend the rest of my career simply helping put more electric cars on Indian roads. I wanted to understand what would make the businesses operating those cars genuinely successful. That question eventually became Milo Drive.

What was the biggest shift when you moved from established organisations to becoming a founder?

Being a second-time founder sounds rather neat in a bio. The first company I built was in agritech. I don’t think of that chapter as a badge. It was my first real education in what happens when an idea leaves your head and starts affecting other people’s time, money and trust. I started Milo with more experience, yes. I also started with fewer illusions.

The difference at Milo is the immediacy of the responsibility. A car that doesn’t run is somebody’s lost earning opportunity. A decision we delay might hold up an operator’s next investment. And when a fundraising conversation takes longer than expected, the cars don’t politely stop needing attention. In a larger organisation, you can often finish your part of the work and hand over the rest. As a founder, there isn’t a department called “not my problem.”

I’m not endlessly confident. There are mornings when I’ve doubted our pace, a decision, even my own judgment. I don’t think the team needs a founder who pretends those days don’t exist. They need one who can still listen, decide, take responsibility and show up again.

Was there a specific observation that made you think, “This is something I should build a company around”?

There wasn’t one dramatic moment. It was a discomfort that grew each time I looked at the same journey from a different side. A passenger books a cab, reaches home and forgets about it. The driver is still working through the economics of that trip long after the passenger has left: the next booking, the empty kilometres, the EMI, the charging stop, the money that must go home at the end of the day.

What stayed with me was that some of the hardest-working people in mobility were effectively running small businesses without the tools we expect any serious business to have. Vishal and I kept coming back to those questions. Neither of us wanted to build another app that passengers had to remember. We wanted to build something useful to the people behind the ride.

And there’s an important distinction here. I don’t want to romanticise the driver or call everyone an entrepreneur. Some people simply want dependable work, and that deserves equal respect. But for the ones who want to own and grow a fleet, there should be a fairer starting line. That’s where Milo came from. A fairly ordinary observation about an ordinary cab ride, and a rather unreasonable ambition about what could sit behind it.

Milo Drive And The Market

What did the first version of Milo Drive look like, and how has it evolved?

In the early days, we were obsessed with getting the fundamentals right. Get the vehicle. Get the driver. Get demand. Make the vehicle earn. Repeat. Then you start operating, and you realise getting a car on the road and building a profitable business around that car are two very different achievements.

Bengaluru and Gurgaon didn’t behave the same way. In one market, rental-led access could make more sense for the people we were serving. In another, we saw opportunities around driver ownership and different partner structures. We couldn’t simply copy and paste one operating model everywhere. Over time, our thinking evolved from deploying vehicles to creating an integrated operating infrastructure for people who own and run them.

Today, we work across vehicle access, multiple demand channels, fleet operations, charging intelligence and technology through our operating platforms. The asset-light approach has been a conscious part of that thinking. There are capable entrepreneurs who want to invest in and operate vehicles. We don’t need to own everything ourselves to participate meaningfully in that value chain. What we need is to make the network work better.

I sometimes joke that our operations team is also our most brutally honest product research department. They don’t care how beautiful a feature looks. They want to know whether it solves the problem they’re dealing with on Tuesday morning.

How does Milo Drive differentiate itself from players like Ola, Uber and other EV mobility companies?

I get asked this quite often, and I think the comparison itself says something about how people traditionally understand mobility. They see cars and immediately think of a cab aggregator. But that’s not what we’re trying to build.

Uber, Ola or Rapido have developed significant capabilities around connecting passengers with available supply. We see an opportunity in making that supply more organised, productive and accessible. A small fleet owner shouldn’t need to depend entirely on one application or one category of customers. Why should a vehicle that serves office commuters in the morning remain commercially underutilised during other parts of the day if there’s relevant demand available elsewhere?

I sometimes explain this with a slightly unusual example. You can book a hotel room through a distribution platform, but somebody still has to run the hotel well. Mobility has its own version of that challenge. And our success doesn’t require people to stop using Uber or Ola. Quite the opposite. A stronger mobility ecosystem creates opportunities for all of us.

I don’t particularly care whether a passenger remembers the Milo Drive name after completing a ride. I care whether the driver wants to continue working with us, the fleet owner wants to add more cars, and the demand partner trusts us with more business. That’s a much more meaningful test of what we’re building.

What is one assumption you had that turned out to be completely different on the ground?

I thought that once you made vehicle access easier and connected the vehicle to demand, a large part of the problem would be solved. I was wrong. Those are important ingredients, but they don’t automatically make someone a good mobility entrepreneur. There is an enormous difference between having demand available and knowing how to run a vehicle profitably against that demand.

And there’s another thing I underestimated: how much trust matters. Technology can show you where a car is. It can tell you what revenue has been recorded. But getting drivers, operators and partners to trust the information, and each other, takes time. That doesn’t happen because you signed an agreement or built an application. It happens when the system keeps working, including on days when things go wrong.

The other assumption I’ve had to challenge is that every problem needs a technology solution. Sometimes you need a better process. Sometimes you need a conversation. Sometimes somebody simply needs to pick up the phone and take ownership.

Growth, Metrics And The Next Round

Which numbers or operating metrics do you personally look at to know whether the company is moving in the right direction?

I won’t pretend I don’t enjoy the milestone numbers. From a small beginning to hundreds of vehicles, and crossing a million rides, there is a lot of work behind that journey. People in our hubs and on our team have earned the right to feel proud of it.

But whenever I see a good-looking growth chart, I ask for the less flattering chart beside it. Which cars weren’t productive? Where did we lose hours? How many partners are actually improving their economics? Which demand channel is doing the heavy lifting, and are we becoming too dependent on it? To me, utilisation and uptime are not abstract metrics. One is about whether an asset is earning. The other is about whether we kept our promise to the person relying on that asset.

There’s a particular moment I value: when a partner already working with Milo decides to put more of their own capital and trust into the network. We can explain our vision beautifully in a presentation. That decision tells me somebody who has experienced the business believes in its usefulness. Scale is exciting. Repeatability is what allows you to sleep a little better.

What determines whether a new city is worth entering?

I’ve learned to be quite respectful of cities. Every city has its own personality, its own demand patterns, operating culture, traffic, economics and infrastructure. Bengaluru and Delhi NCR are both major mobility markets, yet some of the operating assumptions that work in one can be completely unsuitable for the other. The market doesn’t care that you’ve built a successful PowerPoint about expanding nationally.

We start with demand: how predictable it is, whether vehicles can work across multiple use cases, whether there’s enough density. Then supply: credible local partners, driver onboarding, financing, and how reliable the charging and service ecosystem is. Finally, we look at whether we can build a business that’s worth being in after the initial excitement settles.

You can be present in ten cities and still be weak in all ten. I’d much rather have a strong operating model in a few markets, understand why it works and then take that knowledge elsewhere. We don’t need to be everywhere tomorrow.

What have you learned about sustainable unit economics in EV mobility?

I’ll give you the least fashionable answer: a lower running cost doesn’t pay an EMI on a day when the car isn’t earning. We can spend hours debating battery range, charging costs and the savings against conventional vehicles. All of that matters. But the driver and the fleet owner live with the complete economics, not a cost-per-kilometre slide.

I’ve become quite allergic to beautiful unit-economics models built on unusually good days. The business should still make sense in an ordinary week, with traffic, delays, a driver taking leave and a charging session that doesn’t go as planned. And it has to make sense for everyone. If Milo grows while its partners struggle, we’ve moved the burden around rather than creating value.

What does the next phase of Milo Drive look like?

I want Milo to become a much bigger company than it is today. I don’t think founders should be embarrassed about saying that. But my understanding of what “bigger” means has evolved. Initially, growth is very visible: more cars, more rides, more cities. As you spend more time building, you begin appreciating the quality of your technology, the reliability of your operations, the strength of your partner relationships and the capital efficiency of the model.

For the next phase, our focus is on deepening our demand network, strengthening the technology layer and enabling more fleet entrepreneurs to operate successfully. Geographic expansion will follow that. One area I find particularly exciting is the intelligence that can be built when you connect demand data with vehicle performance, charging requirements and operating economics. Imagine a small fleet operator who can make decisions using insights that would previously have required an entire team of analysts: where to deploy vehicles, when to charge, which cars require attention.

Over time, I see Milo becoming less dependent on the physical size of any fleet we directly manage and more valuable because of the network and infrastructure we’re enabling.

What milestones do you want Milo Drive to reach before its next major funding round?

I know how a funding headline looks from the outside. I’ve also lived the months of work, unanswered questions and uncertainty that aren’t in the headline. Capital matters enormously to a company like ours. But a very promising conversation doesn’t keep a vehicle running, and a good term sheet is not a substitute for a good business.

Before the next round, I want a visitor to see the same story from three places: our numbers, our team and the people working with Milo. If those stories are different, no amount of polishing the pitch deck fixes that. That means productive vehicles, healthier economics, trusted partners, technology that is genuinely reducing operating friction, and more of our growth becoming repeatable rather than handcrafted by a few exhausted people.

My ambition for the next round isn’t to tell a bigger story. It’s to have built enough of the business that the story has become harder to argue with.

Beyond Milo Drive

How do you switch off when you’re away from work?

I’m still figuring that out! I’ve always enjoyed pushing myself physically. Motorsport is a big part of that. I’ve trained in Formula 3 racing, and I have a genuine fascination with cars that goes well beyond the industry I work in. You cannot negotiate with physics. You can be having a wonderful day, feeling extremely confident, and one poorly judged corner reminds you that you’re not quite as good as you thought. It’s humbling.

Fitness has become another way for me to clear my head. I like the honesty of training: you can’t talk your way into better endurance. I don’t have a beautiful answer about switching off every evening and having perfect balance. Building Milo takes up a lot of mental space, sometimes more than it should. But I don’t want to spend my life waiting for the day when work finally ends and life begins.

If we speak again five years from now, what would you like Milo Drive to have changed about urban mobility in India?

I hope you ask me that question in five years, and I hope I have a much better answer than a fleet-size number. India has so many people who already know how to work hard, take responsibility and run small businesses. What they don’t always have is affordable access to the systems a large business takes for granted: demand relationships, technology, capital partners, operating data and the ability to recover from a bad month without losing everything they’ve built.

Imagine someone beginning with one commercial vehicle. Today, so much of their attention can be consumed by the next trip, the next payment, the next operational surprise. I want them to have a credible chance, if they choose, to think about the second vehicle, their first employee, or a small fleet they can run professionally. And I want dependable work to be a respectable destination in itself for drivers who don’t want to become business owners.

Yes, I want Milo to be a very large company. I won’t be modest about the ambition. But if we meet again, I’d like you to ask me about the people who grew with us. Ask how many partners were able to build enduring businesses, how many vehicles became more productive, and whether we’ve made an industry that’s tough to enter a little more accessible to ordinary entrepreneurs. The day one of those stories becomes so common that nobody thinks it’s remarkable anymore, that’s when I’ll believe we’re getting somewhere.