An electric three-wheeler costs more to buy than a petrol one and far less to run. For a logistics company with capital, that is an easy trade. For the driver who actually needs the vehicle, it is backwards: nearly all the cost lands upfront, where he has nothing, and the savings dribble in over years. Closing that mismatch, owning the asset so that someone else can use it, has become one of the more investable corners of Asia’s clean-energy transition, and development finance has noticed.
The mechanism is simple and old. Separate the ownership of the vehicle from its use. A fund, a leasing company or a specialized platform buys the electric vehicle (EV) and rents it to the driver or the fleet operator for a monthly fee, absorbing the upfront capital cost and the risk that the battery degrades or the resale value collapses. The driver pays as he earns. The asset sits on someone else’s balance sheet. What is new is who that someone is becoming, and who is standing behind them.
The platform
In April 2026, an Indian startup called Astranova Mobility (founded in 2023 as Electrifi Mobility) raised ₹60 crore (about $6.4 million) in a Series A round led by IvyCap Ventures. Among the existing investors joining the round was the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Astranova is not a manufacturer. It is an EV financing and asset-management platform: it selects the vehicles, finances them, leases them, and wraps in maintenance, roadside assistance and refurbishment. By its own account it has put more than 25,000 electric vehicles on the road, worth over ₹360 crore, spanning two-wheelers, cars, buses and trucks, mostly for logistics customers. It says it aims to deploy $1 billion of EVs within four years.
The presence of a development bank in that cap table is the tell. This is the same de-risking logic that puts a multilateral lender into an Indian toll-road trust or a Nepali data-center company: an anchor institution takes early equity in an unproven asset class, signals that the risk has been examined, and makes the sector legible to the commercial capital that follows. The bank is not buying scooters. It is helping build the machinery that lets pension-fund-style money eventually buy scooters at scale.
The bank is not buying scooters. It is building the machinery that lets other people’s money buy scooters at scale.
The model without the subsidy
Strip the concessional capital away and the same model still runs, just at a steeper price for the user. In Nepal, thee GO, operated by SriBiT (Srijana Binayak Transport), has built the country’s first commercial electric fleet, leasing vehicles alongside its own network of fast chargers, including eleven units installed for the Kathmandu public operator Sajha Yatayat. Its lease-to-own terms are unsentimental: for some commercial vehicles, a deposit of around 500,000 rupees and a monthly payment near 125,000 rupees for five years. That is the market clearing on its own, without a development bank to soften the terms — and it shows exactly how much the softening is worth to the person at the end of the chain.
Bangladesh represents a third route. Rather than a single leasing platform, it has assembled a public financing architecture through the Infrastructure Development Company Limited (IDCOL), a state-established non-bank financial institution (NBFI) that channels concessional money from the World Bank, ADB, the Japan International Cooperation Agency and others into clean-energy assets. Applied to EVs, that approach subsidizes the sector from the top down rather than building a private leasing champion from the bottom up. Which path works better is one of the more useful natural experiments running in South Asian climate finance right now.
Who ends up owning the fleet
The three models — an ADB-backed private platform in India, an unsubsidized commercial fleet in Nepal, a state-assembled finance facility in Bangladesh — are different answers to the same question: how do you get a capital-intensive asset into the hands of people who have labor but not capital? Leasing solves the driver’s cash-flow problem elegantly. It also means the electric transition, at least at its base, is being financed by concentrating ownership of the vehicles in a small number of funds and platforms while the people who drive them own nothing.
Whether that is empowerment or a subtler form of dependence depends on where you stand in the chain, and it is too early to say which will dominate. What is already clear is that the electric two- and three-wheelers multiplying across Asian cities increasingly belong not to the riders weaving through traffic on them, but to a balance sheet somewhere behind them — and, one step further back, to the development bank that decided the risk was worth taking first.