About
Some entrepreneurial journeys begin with investment, established networks, and carefully assembled teams. Others begin with little more than technical curiosity, determination, and a willingness to learn whatever the next challenge demands. For Abhiram Thuraga, building a future in mobility has followed the latter path, one shaped by engineering experience, personal sacrifice, calculated risk, and an enduring belief in turning ambitious ideas into working technology.
Today, Abhiram is the Founder of Thuraga Motors AB in Sweden and its sister company, Thuraga Motors Pvt Ltd in India. A mechatronics engineer and ADAS & Software-Defined Vehicle architect with more than 18 years of experience, his professional journey has included work across Volvo, Qualcomm (Zenseact), and Capgemini Engineering. Alongside that career, he has been developing a mobility venture built around proprietary engineering, capital efficiency, and a connection between Swedish technological expertise and Indian manufacturing capabilities.
His journey in Sweden began in 2010, when he arrived from India with approximately €600 to pursue a Master’s in Digital Signal Processing and Control Systems at Linnaeus University. Financing his education and everyday expenses required taking on part-time work alongside his studies. At times, his financial circumstances became so constrained that potatoes were among the few foods he could regularly afford.
Those experiences strengthened a resilience that would later become central to his entrepreneurial journey. Yet Abhiram was not entering engineering for the first time. Between 2007 and 2010, he worked at Bavina Cars in India as a hardware and firmware engineer, developing BLDC motor controllers and implementing field-oriented control. That early hands-on exposure, combined with his postgraduate studies in Sweden, helped establish the foundation for his later work in advanced mobility systems.
His subsequent career placed him within some of the automotive industry’s demanding technology environments. At Volvo AB and Volvo Construction Equipment, he worked across motor-control software, HIL validation, safety concepts, and simulation technologies for applications ranging from electric drives to vehicle-level autonomy. Later, at Volvo Cars, his responsibilities extended to production functions including Adaptive Cruise Control, Curve Speed Assist, and Speed Limit Assist. He also contributed to the Autopilot Concept, functional architecture, and ISO 26262 safety assessments, before serving as Function Owner and Product Owner within the Decision & Control organization of the DriveMe autonomous-driving program.
His work at Qualcomm (Zenseact) further expanded his experience in decision and control software, technical stabilization, safety practices, and scaling technology across OEM programs. Despite having established a strong corporate career, Abhiram continued to envision building something independently.
After obtaining Swedish citizenship, he decided to leave his position at Qualcomm and pursue that ambition more seriously. It was far from a comfortable transition. With family responsibilities and financial realities to manage, he continued consulting during the day, including work involving advanced braking integration, zonal E&E architecture, and rapid prototyping for Volvo Cars, while dedicating evenings to developing Thuraga Motors.
Limited resources ultimately influenced the kind of founder he became. Unable to build a large specialist team, Abhiram expanded his own capabilities. He taught himself areas including CAD and PCB design, embedded control software, mobile application development, backend systems, and AI algorithms. The process transformed his home workshop in Hisings Backa, Gothenburg, into an intensive development environment where concepts could be designed, tested, rebuilt, and refined.
That work has evolved into a portfolio that Thuraga Motors reports as comprising 64 proprietary technology assets, including software and AI innovations, vehicle and hardware IP families, trademarks, design components, and trade secrets. Its technology encompasses FlexFrame™, a biomimetic vehicle architecture focused on strength and lightness; KARNA™, a central backbone for urban mobility platforms; and SilkTruss™, a lightweight truss architecture intended for aerial applications.
Its technology stack also includes the TA-Series algorithm family and a hierarchical Vehicle Control Unit architecture, alongside concepts such as Predictive Torque, Rider Digital Twin, and Swarm Intelligence. These technologies support applications including the WBR Utility and BWR Urban electric two-wheeler platforms, while the company’s ambitions extend into aerial mobility through Flyga, an eVTOL concept incorporating protected innovations across areas such as hybrid energy, predictive stability control, and autonomous emergency landing.
Underlying these developments is an approach Abhiram describes as an “Anti-Gigafactory” model. Rather than pursuing growth primarily through highly capital-intensive infrastructure, Thuraga Motors is structured around intellectual property and engineering development in Sweden, with manufacturing intended to scale through its Indian operation. Its broader “Made with Sweden” philosophy seeks to combine Swedish design principles, processes, and quality standards with India’s manufacturing scale and industrial potential.
The company’s progress has also moved toward strategic collaboration. Thuraga Motors Private Limited has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with the Bondada Group, creating a framework to explore technology collaboration, scalable deployment, and longer-term value creation. For Abhiram, however, such milestones matter most when intent translates into tangible execution: partnerships ultimately have to result in what can actually be built and deployed.
Behind the engineering achievements lies an equally significant personal challenge. Abhiram has continued his professional and entrepreneurial work while managing a progressing diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. Rather than allowing the condition to define his ambitions, he has continued developing technology, consulting, and leading his venture, a demanding combination that adds another dimension to his philosophy of persistence.
Looking ahead, his priority is moving Thuraga Motors beyond prototypes and toward broader commercialization. Having personally built and ridden its WBR Utility and BWR Urban platforms, he envisions a pathway that begins with electric two-wheelers and eventually extends into the low-altitude economy through Flyga.
Abhiram’s journey offers a distinctive interpretation of what it means to be an emerging visionary. It is not simply about imagining technology that does not yet exist, but developing the skills, intellectual property, partnerships, and perseverance required to make that imagination tangible. From arriving in Sweden with €600 to building an extensive proprietary technology portfolio, his story reflects a principle that has guided him throughout: vision becomes meaningful only when someone is prepared to keep working toward it.
For Abhiram Thuraga, that work continues, one design, one prototype, and one ambitious idea at a time.
