BluSmart Raised ₹4,300 Crore To Build India's Cleanest EV Cab Service. The Founders Used Part Of It To Buy Personal Luxury Items.

DELHI/BENGALURU — BluSmart was, for a brief and genuine period, a genuinely good startup. If you used it, you know: the cabs arrived on time, they were clean, the drivers were professional, the air conditioning worked, there was no surge pricing, the company had made a real promise and was keeping it on the side that passengers saw. For anyone who has experienced the chaos of Ola's cancellation rate or the surge-pricing adventures of Uber during peak hours, a cab service that simply did what it promised — arrived, was clean, was electric, was priced consistently — was something worth paying a small premium for. People paid. The app ratings were good. The investor thesis — that India would pay for quality and reliability in urban mobility — was not wrong.

The problems were on the side passengers did not see. BluSmart operated a fleet-heavy model that required enormous upfront capital to purchase electric vehicles, which it did through its affiliate Gensol Engineering — a company that raised money from banks and the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development by claiming it needed the funds to purchase EVs for BluSmart. SEBI's investigation found that a significant portion of this borrowed money — ₹168 crore, per SEBI's order — was diverted not to EV purchases but to personal use by the Jaggi brothers, Anmol Singh Jaggi and Puneet Singh Jaggi, including luxury real estate and high-end vehicles. The EVs were not all purchased. The money was not all there. The fleet that BluSmart was supposedly operating on was partially built on capital that was earmarked for it and used for something else entirely.

SEBI's order is specific and documented and worth reading in full because it contains details that are extraordinary even by the standards of Indian startup governance failure. The Jaggi brothers are accused of using a complex web of related-party transactions to move money from Gensol to entities they controlled, and from there to personal accounts used for luxury purchases. The purchases included high-value real estate in Gurugram. This is money that came from public market investors who believed they were financing the purchase of electric vehicles for a cab service. The electric vehicles, in a genuinely poetic structural irony, were the vehicles that the cab service's passengers were riding in, which were the vehicles that the investors believed they were financing, which were the vehicles that were partially not purchased because the money had gone somewhere else. The passengers were in real cabs. The cabs were partially not paid for. The investors were funding real estate. The real estate is real. The cab service has shut down. The real estate remains in Gurugram.

In April 2025, BluSmart abruptly shut operations across Delhi and Bengaluru with minimal notice to drivers, passengers, or employees. Drivers who had made EMI commitments based on BluSmart income suddenly found the income stopped. Passengers found the app stopped showing rides. Employees found their salaries in question. SEBI barred the Jaggi brothers from securities markets and from serving as directors of any listed company. The case is proceeding through NCLT and court. The brothers have denied the allegations. The evidence is in SEBI's published order, which is a public document, which everyone can read, which this reporter recommends reading in full as a case study in governance failure so thorough it becomes instructive. BluSmart was a real idea. The EV mission was real. The cab rides were genuinely good. The ₹168 crore diversion is, per SEBI's findings, also real. All of these things are simultaneously true. This is the complete story of BluSmart: a good product, a real mission, a financial structure that contained a fraud, and Gurugram apartments where the clean mobility money may have gone.