New Delhi: Just two days after SEBI’s interim order penalising Gensol proprietors Anmol and Puneet Jaggi over corporate misgovernance and fund diversion, Anmol Jaggi apparently put up a strong front at the quarterly meeting of Matrix Gas investors.
“He [Anmol] said that the company is confident, and asked investors to not lose faith in them, and that they will ensure we get good returns. He said that they will ‘take care’ of the SEBI order,” a small capital fund manager, who was part of the call, told ThePrint.
Following the order, however, both brothers resigned from their roles as directors of Gensol. In a statement, the company said that it will cooperate with SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India) and the forensic audit of its accounts.
Words of comfort will do little damage control now. Gensol stock has come crashing down as much as 90 per cent from its 52-week high. The brothers abruptly halted the operations of BluSmart, their most popular company, and on LinkedIn, current employees have started flashing the ‘Open To Work’ badge.
The story of the Indian startup space’s blue-eyed boys took a dark turn courtesy SEBI. In an order on 15 April, the market regulator barred the promoters of Gensol Industries Ltd—Anmol Singh Jaggi and Puneet Singh Jaggi—from accessing the securities market until further notice. SEBI prima facie found that funds raised from the public company were being diverted for personal use by the brothers. They allegedly used funds raised for procurement of BluSmart EVs to buy a lavish property in DLF Camellias, took a spa treatment running into lakhs of rupees, and used investor money like a ‘piggy bank’.
Investors and other entrepreneurs, in the meantime, see the downfall of Gensol and Blusmart as yet another indicator that India’s startup story is going nowhere.
“Fund raise, markets, and the economy are slowing down. We have to accept this fact. So everyone will have to pace their path to these aspirations, which were otherwise achievable much faster from 2012 to 2022. The golden period for tech startups is well and really over,” said Ashneer Grover, who has invested in BluSmart and Matrix.
‘Aged like milk’
Anmol and Puneet are known for their business acumen, clarity of thought, and calm demeanour, said people who have worked with them in the past.
Sons of an Army officer, the duo grew up all over the country. Anmol, the elder brother, always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but his father wasn’t too encouraging of the idea. It was an internship at Reliance Industries as a college student where Anmol learnt of ‘carbon credits’. He founded Gensol as a consulting firm while in college.
“At Reliance Industries, my job was to sell gas. I learnt of carbon credits there, where if you save on carbon emissions, then the government will pay you, or the United Nations will pay you. That got me hooked, and we created a tagline for ourselves [Gensol]: It pays to be environment friendly,” Anmol said in a conversation with Humans of Bombay posted a year ago.
“This aged like milk,” read a comment under the video.
Started in 2007—the year Anmol graduated from the University of Petrol Engineering and Energy Studies in Dehradun—Gensol provided expertise to their investors in carbon trading, footprinting, and mitigation as well as solar power.
The company quickly occupied the top spaces in India’s carbon trading consultancy firms. By 2010, they had a clientele of more than 350 firms, including Bajaj Hindustan and Zaveri & Co. But the 2008 recession and shutdown of factories in the UK meant carbon trading had suffered, Puneet revealed in a ‘Founder Thesis’ podcast published a year ago.
While Anmol was tapping into the renewable energy spaspace, his brother Puneet was graduating from IIT Roorkee. As part of a programme before joining Shell as an executive, Puneet got 100 days to travel and visit solar farms all over the country. He saw the potential for knowledge and wealth gain in the solar industry.
“We pivoted from being a carbon consultant to a solar consultant. Eventually, we became consultants to projects close to 33,000 megawatts. India has 60,000 megawatts installed, that’s practically every other megawatt of installed projects that is there in the country,” Puneet said during the ‘Founder Thesis’ conversation.
Soon, the company started designing mega solar projects in India. The first one it designed and created was a 10 kilowatt project in Delhi, which gave it great margins and a first mover advantage. The brothers then moved into the operation and maintenance of these plants, and by 2017-18, they had 800 employees, and a revenue generation of Rs 100 crore.
Anmol and Puneet, both engineers, were itching to launch a tech business, and explored the electric vehicle industry, which was then at a nascent stage. In 2016, they launched Prescinto, which helped businesses run solar and wind energy projects more efficiently. Riding on a high, the brothers listed Gensol as a public company in September 2019.
The same year, they founded BluSmart with 15 cars, which would go on to become the largest electric fleet in the country with 8,000 EVs.
“Every entrepreneur wants to see his company’s name going around the ticker on the screen; there’s a certain dream and thrill for an entrepreneur,” Puneet said in the podcast.
Just a month ago, Puneet was boasting on X about his reliability.
“A large client gave an order because in his words, ‘you can trust a Sikh,’” he wrote as one of the ‘milestones’ of his career.
1/6: 2010: A large client gave an order because in his words, "you can trust a Sikh"!
— Puneet Jaggi (@puneetjaggi) February 9, 2025
Also read: BluSmart was a clean mobility success story. Exposes corporate governance at India’s startups
A manicured business
In 2019, when the Jaggi brothers were launching an IPO for Gensol, they were also raising funds for their ambitious project, ‘BluSmart’.
Since BluSmart would own its cars, it was going to be a capital–intensive business—a cause for concern for many investors. But it was BP Ventures’ $13 million investment in series A funding round in 2021, out of a total $25 million, that bolstered investor confidence.
One such angel investor met the brothers to evaluate the company for investment. “I met the Jaggis along with Puneet Goyal multiple times to evaluate the company for investment by our capital firm, but I was never convinced of the business model,” he told ThePrint.
“When they started the business, the electric vehicle space was still very new. To meet the demand for vehicles, they told us they would give people the opportunity to lease the cars to them at a 12 per cent return. They didn’t know where their charging spaces would be, which cannot be established in the middle of the city. I thought they were making very tall claims and decided not to invest,” the investor added.
However, sitting in the top-notch BluSmart cars, he often wondered if his assessment was correct—the service was fantastic, customers loved it, and the cars were always on time. “As an angel investor, you often think of the businesses you never invested in,” he said.
According to a Tracxn report, BluSmart promised sky-high returns to its investors. Most of these investors are small, with shares of 0.1 to 1.1 per cent—except BP Ventures, which has a 13.1 per cent stake in the company.
BluSmart had over 14 funding rounds: Two seed rounds, eight early-stage rounds, and four debt rounds. It has raised a total capital of Rs 634 crore, the returns of which are valued at Rs 2,900 crore. Almost all of it is ‘unrealised return’, meaning the founder has not cashed it out yet.
“The number of rounds through which BluSmart has raised money is itself a red flag and doesn’t bode well for the company. It is a negative marker that they need so many rounds to raise capital. Quarter after quarterly meeting, they have promised a better return, and have never cashed it,” said the fund manager who was present at the Matrix Gas investors meeting.
“All the Jaggi brothers were interested in was raising capital anyhow. They wouldn’t move past the thought of raising the capital, and focused on expanding the business—they were obsessed with it,” said a former employee of Venture Catalysts on the condition of anonymity.
“They wanted to become big too fast, they didn’t. Hence the fundraising. They prioritised themselves over investors for sure,” the employee said.
When ThePrint reached out to Punit Goyal, he responded by sharing a report stating that Eversource Capital is in talks to acquire BluSmart.
“Eversource has put up a condition that BluSmart cofounders, Anmol Singh Jaggi and Puneet Singh Jaggi, move out of the startup,” read the report.
BluSmart also had celebrity investors like MS Dhoni and Deepika Padukone. But now, its small investors are nervous.
“The first people to be paid if the company is liquidated will be the debtors, then the big investors will recover some money, small investors will get nothing,” the fund manager said.
Retail investors, he added, were betting on BluSmart to play the “long game”, and assumed that the company would soon go public.
“Anmol made Gensol a public company. There was hope that BluSmart would go the same way,” he said.
Also read: India’s startup innovation crisis: vegan ice cream vs deep tech
A sinking ship
Seeds of discord have been evident in the company for the last one and a half months. Several directors of Gensol and BluSmart have quit over corporate governance issues, and everyone seems to have distanced themselves from the Jaggi brothers.
“We have worked with a lot of love and labour to make BluSmart the brand it is today. It pains us to distance ourselves from the company, but I cannot say more because we signed contracts with the company not to speak to the media in any way,” said one of the directors who resigned over corporate governance issues.
Now that BluSmart’s operations have been halted abruptly, customers have been taking to X, mourning a dependable ride-hailing service that offered clean cabs, polite drivers, and no cancellations.
Thousands of drivers have been stranded. They have no clarity on what future awaits them.
“I have been told to wait for a week till the company resolves its internal issues, then I can come back to work,” said Arun, who has been working with BluSmart as an EV driver for a year.
Another driver, Maneesh, says his ID has been ‘temporarily blocked’ from the portal. “I was late once to the office and they seem to have fired me after it,” he said.
Maneesh has been unemployed for a month now. A BluSmart driver for the last 4 years, he said that he used to drive 14 hours a day to be able to take home Rs 30,000 a month. “The car’s responsibility was ours. Even if there was an accident or a small scratch, we had to get it fixed from our pocket,” Maneesh added.
The future of BluSmart’s fleet—and that of its drivers—is in the doldrums. While some vehicles have been leased directly from high-net-worth individuals, the majority of the fleet is leased from Gensol and could be acquired by lenders for non-payment of loans.
Classmates and colleagues said there was little to complain about the Jaggi brothers’ behaviour. Multiple people described them as polite, calm, and composed. The duo also carried the ‘Army kids’ label as a badge of honour. But even with all the dizzying heights they reached before crashing down, the elites say they don’t exactly know who the brothers are.
No company culture I have come across beats the brotherhood of men in arms! Happy #ArmyDay #armykid #daddysboy #olivegreen #homeoffice pic.twitter.com/cSJdoMT5vu
— Puneet Jaggi (@puneetjaggi) January 16, 2022
“I have found out from online press reports that we apparently have some illustrious neighbours. But I don’t know them at all,” a Camellias resident said.
“They seem to have risked their entire empire over a flat at Camellias,” another resident laughed, claiming that they don’t know the brothers personally.
Ashneer Grover is miffed that DLF Camellias’ name is being dragged through the mud.
“It’s unfortunate DLF Camellias’ name is getting drawn in the controversy. It’s the best residential project in India and more than 30 startup founders own condos here, as well as 200 other big industrialists,” he said. “You have to be really shallow if you think you’ll get status by being here anyhow.”
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)