Runs a motor company from a New Hampshire town of seventeen thousand people, with engineering in the UK and an office in Chennai. Sold his previous startup to Cisco for a hundred million dollars in 1996. Spent the two decades in between investing in forty other companies. Then, at an age when most people slow down, started a hardware business.
Nick Grewal is the founder, president, chairman and CEO of ePropelled, and he would like you to know that the average electric motor throws away between a quarter and two-thirds of its energy as heat. His motors, he says, are 96 percent efficient. That number, more than anything else, is the company.
ePropelled sits in Laconia, New Hampshire - a lake town of about seventeen thousand people, better known for a summer motorcycle rally than for propulsion physics. From that address, Grewal ships smart-propulsion systems and energy-management controllers to customers on four continents. The company has 110 employees, engineering operations in the United Kingdom, an office in Chennai, and, as of late 2025, 47 patents granted or pending across 13 product lines. The industry it competes in is very old. The efficiency numbers are very new.
Grewal's phrase for this arrangement is "a startup that's globally local," which is the sort of thing a founder says when the growth curve has outrun the word "startup" but the equity structure has not.
ePropelled was founded in 2018, and for the first stretch of its life it was in the business of making light electric vehicles more efficient - which, at the time, sounded like the correct business to be in. Then Grewal decided it was not. "We decided that EVs are not going to be it," he told DroneLife in 2025, "and we needed to get into unmanned systems." He said this quietly, the way founders sometimes describe pivots that turned out well.
The pivot's underlying argument is small and hard to argue with. Batteries are heavy. Drones - the ones that matter, the ones that fly long enough and far enough to be useful for delivery, surveillance, or defense - cannot fly on batteries alone. "You need a hybrid drone," Grewal said. ePropelled builds the pieces that make hybrid drones work: the motors, the generators, the power-management systems, and the telemetry that lets an operator understand what a machine hundreds of miles away is doing to its own batteries.
This is the sort of insight that seems obvious once someone says it and expensive to have said too late. ePropelled did not say it too late.
In 1996, Cisco Systems bought Nashoba Networks - a company Grewal had founded and led as CEO - for approximately $100 million. He became a Cisco Vice President. This was a good outcome. It was, in the language of Boston-area tech, the outcome. Founders who arrive there often stop.
Grewal did not stop. Instead, from 1998 to 2018, he ran an investment vehicle called Onlake Investments and put money into more than forty high-tech companies. He also worked as a venture partner at Data Point Capital and touched Assent Venture Partners and ViMAC. Twenty years is a long time to be an investor before starting another operating company. Most people in that position either become full-time investors or become the kind of retired that involves a lake house. Grewal has a lake house - Laconia is on Lake Winnipesaukee - but he also started ePropelled.
The engineering side of his resume, which is easy to overlook next to the deals, runs backward from Cisco through CrossCom, Proteon, Fibronics, and Compugraphics. He holds a Bachelor of Science from London South Bank University. This is the sort of background that makes a founder confident enough to argue with electric-motor efficiency curves that have not moved much in a decade.
The product catalog covers a range of applications that would be intimidating for a company with more employees: motors and generators for unmanned aerial vehicles, marine propulsion, industrial pumps (including pool and spa), aerospace, and light electric vehicles. The technology backbone is a set of patented magnetics designs the company describes as "reconfigurable windings" and "dynamic torque switching," which is engineering-marketing shorthand for motors that behave differently depending on what the operator needs at that moment.
The NDAA-compliant portion of the drone-motor line matters more than the general spec sheet suggests. It means the motors can be sold into US defense procurement without triggering the country-of-origin problems that have taken so many low-cost competitors out of the running. ePropelled has also signed a supply deal with USA Rare Earth for sintered neo-magnets. Grewal has been open about why this matters. "Rare earths get mined all around the world," he said. "The problem is that it's only in China where they're actually refining this stuff."
The manufacturing target is 100,000 to 150,000 motors per year in the near term, from a facility in Laconia. This is not a boutique number. It is the number of a company that expects to be a supplier, not a demonstration.
Not every quotable moment is triumphant. Grewal has spoken candidly about losing his Ukrainian customer base. "Unfortunately, since the tail end of last year when our politics changed a little bit, we haven't had one order from Ukraine," he told DroneLife in October 2025. It is a rare thing for a CEO to tell an interviewer, on tape, that a particular political shift cost him a particular market, and Grewal did not soften it. He also did not attach a strategy for winning the orders back. The remark reads like an entry in a ledger, not an argument.
In March 2025, at the Middle-Market M&A Conference in Boston, Nick Grewal was inducted into the Smart Business Dealmakers Hall of Fame, alongside four other CEOs. He accepted the honor with the compulsory grace. "I am honored to be inducted to the 2025 Hall of Fame Class for Boston's Smart Business Dealmakers," he said, "and to be recognized among such a respectable list of CEOs." The word "dealmaker" is a slightly odd fit for an engineer who has been running the same operating company for seven years. But then, "dealmaker" in Boston usually means "person who has done a lot of deals over a long time," and by that measure Grewal qualifies unambiguously: the Cisco sale, forty portfolio companies, a Series A in 2021, an ongoing relationship with Data Point Capital, and now a rare-earth magnet contract that reads more like a treaty than a purchase order.
Founder, President, CEO and Chairman of ePropelled, a smart-propulsion and energy-management company based in Laconia, New Hampshire.
A company that designs electric motors and power-management systems for drones, marine vessels, aerospace, and light electric vehicles, with motors that reach up to 96% efficiency.
Grewal's earlier startup, which he sold to Cisco Systems in 1996 for approximately $100 million. He then served as a Cisco Vice President.
He holds a Bachelor of Science from London South Bank University.
As of 2025, the company reports 47 patents granted or pending across 13 product lines.