Rare-Earth free: Bhaktha Keshavachar on Chara’s strategic mission, one motor at a time

Bhaktha Ram Keshavachar, Co-Founder and CEO of Chara TechnologiesMy guest today is Bhaktha Ram Keshavachar, founder and CEO of Chara Technologies, in Bengaluru. Chara is at the forefront of a technological shift that could reshape for the better India’s electric mobility landscape, and potentially make an impact overseas as well.The mission is both urgent and ambitious: to build high-performance electric motors that are free of rare earth magnets — a critical component in most electric vehicles and industrial machines today.Bhaktha and his fellow founders Ravi Prasad, the chief motor designer, and Mahalingam Koushik, the CTO at Chara, are engineering veterans from industry, each one bringing decades of experience to their entrepreneurial journey.It started in late 2019, just as the world was heading into the uncertainty of the Covid pandemic. Recognizing the strategic risks posed by global dependence on rare earth minerals — with China controlling about 90 percent of the global refining and processing — and also the environmental impact, he and his team set out to engineer an alternative.The result is a new generation of reluctance motors, designed and manufactured in India, that match or surpass the efficiency of traditional permanent-magnet motors, while sidestepping the environmental and geopolitical pitfalls of rare earth mining.L-R: Ravi Prasad, chief motor designer, Mahalingam Koushik, CTO, and Bhaktha Keshavachar, CEO at Chara Technologies are building a new generation of made-in-India reluctance motorsIn this conversation, Bhaktha shares the technical and business challenges Chara has overcome — from early R&D pivots and tackling the challenge of torque ripple in reluctance motors, to building a pilot production facility and securing industry partnerships, including a manufacturing and distribution alliance with Greaves Cotton.He discusses the hurdles of deep tech entrepreneurship in India, the evolving talent landscape, and Chara’s plan to take its products global.Whether you’re a founder, investor, engineer, or simply curious about the future of cleaner technology, this episode offers an example of how Indian deep tech innovation is rising to meet one of the challenges of our era: building a sustainable, secure, and scalable electric future — one motor at a time.