Latest news with #Kimbal
Business Standard
27-06-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Trust on Overdrive: How Kimbal's People-First Playbook Catapulted It to India's Top Workplaces in 2025
India PR Distribution New Delhi [India], June 27: Kimbal's meteoric rise-from 40 humble heads-in-hoodies to 450 passionate professionals in just 24 months has now been crowned 34th spot on the 2025 India's Great Mid-Size Workplaces Index from Great Place to Work®. What sets this energy-tech disruptor apart? Radical freedom baked into every job description. Freedom is the operating system Employees have complete autonomy over their working hours and time off. "No approvals needed." While a few roles follow fixed schedules for operational continuity, the majority have full flexibility to work at their preferred times and hours if it has no impact on the outcome. Budgets without bureaucracy There's no multi-layer approval tree for travel, tools, or training. Or for that matter, anything. A single guideline governs every expense: Do it with responsibility and care. The result: swift decisions, wise habits, and zero red tape. 360-degree feedback in real-time At Kimbal, feedback flows quickly, objectively, and in all directions. They don't wait for quarterly reviews to do that. Everyone is encouraged to give and receive input regularly, creating a culture of continuous learning and collective growth. Rewards wired to values Kimbal celebrates both the destination and the journey taken to reach it. Aligning with the company's values and taking full ownership of the process carry as much weight as the final results. Missteps are regarded as vital lessons--they believe in failing fast to learn faster. "Our culture isn't perks; it's radical trust," says Kimbal's CHRO, Ms. Jaya Suri. "When people feel safe to think big and act fast, growth becomes an inevitable outcome." For Kimbal, the Great Place to Work® plaque is less a finish line than a pit stop. As the company continues its swift expansion and a twelve million smart meter rollout, its greatest asset remains the same: a workforce unshackled by traditional rules--and united by an audacious vision to rewire India's energy future.
Business Standard
16-06-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Kimbal Reaffirms Commitment to North-East Energy Transition at IEEMA's Northeastern Power Conclave Event
India PR Distribution New Delhi [India], June 16: Kimbal Private Limited, one of India's foremost OEM to Advanced Metering Infrastructure Service Provider (AMISP) companies, reinforced its long-standing commitment to the North-East power sector at the Indian Electrical & Electronics Manufacturers' Association (IEEMA) regional energy summit held in Guwahati on 17-18 June 2025. During the opening session, Chief Business Officer Gurpreet Oberoi traced the region's transformation from manual billing to data-driven efficiency towards a reliable grid, underscoring that "smart meters are the foundation on which resilient, digitally empowered utilities are built." His remarks carried special significance as Kimbal's very first utility project began in Assam in 2016. That early collaboration laid the groundwork for today's large-scale deployments across the North-East. Since that first 14,000-meter pilot with APDCL, Kimbal has shipped more than 1.5 million integrated AMI endpoints in the region. Each endpoint pairs a BIS-certified single-phase or three-phase smart meter with an RF-mesh communication module and a secure, cloud-native Head-End System. The solution is live or under rollout with five Northeastern utilities --Assam Power Distribution Company Limited (APDCL), Meghalaya Power Distribution Corporation Limited (MePDCL), Sikkim Power Department, Department of Power Nagaland, and Department of Power Arunachal Pradesh--helping them curb technical and commercial losses, improve outage response, and introduce consumer-facing digital services. Nationwide, Kimbal has supplied over 3 million smart meters and has worked with more than twenty utilities, making it one of the fastest-growing AMI providers under India's ambitious Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme (RDSS). Growth has been anchored by the company's four-acre mega manufacturing plant in Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh. Fully automated assembly lines give the facility a rated capacity of 30,000 smart meters per day, while an in-house Manufacturing Execution System guarantees high precision throughput and complete traceability from PCB loading to final packaging. Kimbal's technology leadership extends beyond hardware. Its AI-enabled meter-reading solution, trained on computer-vision models, automatically extracts and registers data and diagnostics from photos of the static meters display. APDCL's early adoption of the tool accelerated their bill processing cycles and improved collection efficiency across not only urban but rural areas, too. Looking ahead, Kimbal is sharpening its focus on technology-driven energy intelligence with three new digital solutions in the pipeline. Energy Management Solution (EMS) will automate power procurement for commercial and industrial customers, continuously matching demand with the most cost-efficient supply. A dedicated Energy Monitoring Tool (EMT) will provide substation-level oversight, automating usage analytics and alerting operators to anomalies in real time. For households, a forthcoming appliance-wise consumption tracker will break down energy use by device, turning raw data into clear budgeting insights. This new product line reaffirms the company's commitment to staying at the forefront of innovation and extending affordable, reliable, high-quality electricity to everyone it serves. The Guwahati event drew senior officials from government departments, nodal agencies, distribution utilities, and manufacturing partners. Their discussions converged on a single theme: that reliable data and indigenous innovation are essential to the North-East's economic aspirations. About Kimbal Founded in 2011, Kimbal Private Limited delivers end-to-end AMI solutions, RF-mesh communication infrastructure, and AI-based tools that enable utilities to provide reliable, affordable, and sustainable energy to millions of consumers. The company's portfolio now spans hardware manufacture, software development, and data-intelligence-driven services designed to accelerate India's energy transition and support global decarbonization goals. For additional information, visit or email to stories@
Time of India
02-06-2025
- Automotive
- Time of India
Tesla board members dump nearly $200 million in shares just before robotaxi launch – should investors worry?
Tesla's insiders have raised concerns among investors as two board of directors members of the EV giant have sold almost $200 million in stock, just a few weeks before the launch of the company's highly anticipated robotaxi in Texas, as per a report. Details of Tesla's Insider Sales The two board members are; Ira Ehrenpreis , who is the founder of venture capital firm DBL Partners, and Kimbal Musk , who is the brother of Tesla CEO Elon Musk and a long-time board member, have recently sold some of their Tesla stocks, reported Benzinga. ALSO READ: A growing crisis: Household goods are becoming too expensive, and Americans are feeling the pinch Play Video Pause Skip Backward Skip Forward Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration 0:00 Loaded : 0% 0:00 Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 1x Playback Rate Chapters Chapters Descriptions descriptions off , selected Captions captions settings , opens captions settings dialog captions off , selected Audio Track default , selected Picture-in-Picture Fullscreen This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Text Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Caption Area Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Drop shadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like If You Eat Ginger Everyday for 1 Month This is What Happens Tips and Tricks Undo Sales Were Pre-Planned Under Rule 10b5-1 While, both of their sales were under Rule 10b5-1 plans , which are pre-approved and based on provisions such as time and/or the price of the stock, according to the report. Ehrenpreis filed Form 144 for the sale of 477,572 Tesla shares worth about $162.1 million and even Kimbal filed Form 144 for the sale of 91,588 Tesla shares worth about $31.1 million, reported Benzinga. Live Events According to an Electrek report, Ehrenpreis' term on the Tesla board will end this year and the sale of his stocks might have been a way of exiting his position. Why the Timing Still Feels Off Ehrenpreis' Rule 10b5-1 plan was adopted in December 2024 and Kimbal's was adopted in July 2024, as reported by Benzinga. According to the report, the Rule 10b5-1 plan is less than a year old and might have been put into place based on the timeline of current and future Tesla catalysts, including the launch of robotaxis in Texas. As per the Electrek report, "The timing of the sales ahead of the robotaxi launch could instil less confidence in investors." FAQs Why are Tesla board members selling stock now? They sold stock under pre-planned agreements, but the timing, right before a major product launch, has made some investors uneasy. Who sold Tesla stock recently? Ira Ehrenpreis and Kimbal Musk, both members of Tesla's board, sold nearly $200 million worth of shares, as per Benzinga report.
Forbes
20-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How Elon Musk Made His Brother A Fortune
Earlier this month, after President Trump's 'Liberation Day' tariffs announcement wiped trillions of dollars off global equity markets, Elon Musk expressed his pique by picking a fight with Trump's tariff-hawk trade advisor Peter Navarro and sharing a video on X of free-trade economist Milton Friedman. Kimbal Musk, Elon's 53-year-old younger brother, was far more direct. He called Trump 'the most high tax American President in generations.' He attacked the 'Trump tariff-tax', saying it drove up prices for everyday goods. He urged Trump to fire Navarro. In one post, Kimbal even appeared to question Trump's intelligence. It was quite the change of tune. For most of the last few months, Kimbal appeared fully on board with Trump's agenda, repeatedly praising the administration and his brother's efforts to gut federal agencies as head of the Department of Government Efficiency. But as recently as a year ago, before Elon endorsed Trump and became his biggest campaign donor, Kimbal described himself as 'not a Trump supporter.' Following Elon's lead has been lucrative for Kimbal, a trained chef who is often photographed in his signature cowboy hat. Thanks entirely to small stakes in Elon's two largest companies, SpaceX and Tesla, the younger Musk brother is worth an estimated $900 million. At Tesla's peak in December, he was worth an estimated $1.3 billion. Kimbal joined Tesla's board in 2004, a position that came with generous share awards: he's sold $262 million of Tesla stock since 2010 but still has a stake in the automaker worth $380 million. Kimbal was on SpaceX's board from 2002 until 2022; he has sold $100 million of shares of the private company on secondary markets and his remaining stake is worth around $200 million, Forbes estimates. Kimbal belongs to an elite group of centimillionaires and billionaires – the Musktocracy – who owe all or part of their fortunes to Elon Musk, the richest man in the world with a net worth of $363 billion. These people range from well-known investors like Marc Andressen and Larry Ellison, to board members and early employees at his companies. Compared to Elon, Kimbal's own ventures have been far less successful. While he didn't comment for this story (he did not reply to repeated requests for an interview), Forbes spoke with eight people who worked directly with him in various capacities over the last 20 years. They described a laid-back personality who prefers cooking to high-stakes dealmaking and building tech companies, but who has continually been drawn into Elon's orbit. 'There was always this sense that Kimbal was being shit on by Elon, and Kimbal just wanted to cook,' says a person who worked closely with the younger Musk while Kimbal was CEO of OneRiot, a social media startup, between 2006 and 2010. The person recalls one episode when Kimbal was contemplating laying off 10% of the company's engineering staff — apparently at Elon's suggestion — only to back off after receiving internal pushback. 'He didn't understand how systems were built. He didn't understand engineering... He was driving people crazy,' says the person. 'He just wanted to cook.' That culinary passion led him to start two food businesses. The Kitchen, a Boulder-based farm-to-table restaurant that Kimbal first opened in 2004, has expanded to three more locations, with positive reviews from food critics and restaurant goers. He founded Square Roots, an urban farming company that grows vegetables in shipping containers in 2016, and raised $90 million in funding between 2017 and 2022. Investors included Valor Equity, the private equity firm led by Elon's good friend and Tesla backer Antonio Gracias, and Craft Ventures, the investment firm started by David Sacks, an early SpaceX investor and Elon pal who now serves in the Trump administration as the crypto and AI czar. Square Roots has little to show for all that money, having laid off most of its staff in 2023, closing several of its locations, and announcing its pivot to a 'farming as a service' business model. Kimbal's latest venture, drone light show startup Nova Sky Stories, has so far also relied on Elon's connections. Its most notable client is Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, which announced in January it would pay Nova Sky Stories an undisclosed amount to conduct light shows across the petrostate for the next two years. The Qatari fund is also a major backer of Elon Musk's X and xAI and Qatar Airways recently introduced a partnership with Elon's satellite internet provider Starlink to bring wi-fi aboard its commercial airliners. Nova Sky Stories has also repeatedly done business with Tesla. The electric automaker hired Nova Sky Stories to do a show last October for an event promoting its self-driving vehicles. Clay Coleman, who worked for the drone company in 2022 and 2023 after joining from Intel, also recalled doing shows for Tesla's opening of its Austin gigafactory and the launch of the Cybertruck. 'He wasn't just being like this snotty rich kid buying a company. He was like, super invested,' recalls Coleman. During their childhood in South Africa during the 1970s and 80s, while Elon was reading science fiction novels, Kimbal, who is 15 months younger, was already cultivating his love of food and cooking. He prepared his first meal, roast chicken and french fries, when he was 11. 'My mom would [make] brown bread, plain yogurt and boiled squash. You know, like the absolute most disgusting things that a child could imagine eating,' Kimbal recalled last year on the Lex Fridman podcast. 'And so I said, 'Can I cook?' And she said, 'Yeah, if you wanna cook, no problem.'' Cooking also gave Kimbal something he craved—time with family around the dinner table. 'I was like, wow, this is a very powerful thing that I've now got, where in no other way could I have that connection with my family.' After graduating from high school, Kimbal joined his brother, mother and sister who had all moved to Toronto. For college, Kimbal followed his brother to Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Elon transferred after two years to the University of Pennsylvania, but Kimbal stayed put, graduating from Queen's in 1995 with a degree in business. Even before graduating, Kimbal was enlisted by Elon to cofound and help build his first startup, online business registry Zip2. Working out of a tiny office in Palo Alto, the two brothers would sleep in the office, shower at the YMCA, and, according to Walter Isaacon's biography of Elon, fight constantly, including physical 'rolling-on-the-office-floor flights.' During one particularly vicious brawl, Kimbal bit Elon's hand and tore off flesh. 'I love, love, love my brother very much, but working with him was hard,' Kimbal told Isaacson. The brothers sold Zip2 in 1999 for $307 million in an all-cash deal that provided $15 million (pre-tax) to Kimbal, according to Isaacson's book. And for a time, it seemed Kimbal was going on his own path: As Elon created a new payments startup (which later merged with upstart PayPal), Kimbal moved to New York to attend The French Culinary Institute. The 18-month program was like a scene out of The Bear, with abusive head chefs berating their underlings. 'There were times where I'm like, 'I can't handle this,'' Kimbal recalled on the Lex Fridman podcast. 'I would literally say to my friends, 'Oh, I gotta go to cooking school. I'm gonna go get screamed at for the next six or seven hours.'" But after graduation, Kimbal was pulled back into Elon's orbit, joining his latest venture, SpaceX. Jim Cantrell, a space entrepreneur and one of SpaceX's first employees, recalls Kimbal's involvement during the fledgling startup's first initiative, Mars Oasis, a quixotic (and ultimately unsuccessful) plan to send a rocket to Mars and drop off a glass-enclosed greenhouse that was meant to stir up public enthusiasm for Musk's dream of colonizing Mars. 'He would show up at a lot of the meetings. Elon sort of had him as a consigliere. That's kind of what it felt like. He didn't talk much. He was kind of quiet,' recalls Cantrell. From 2005 to 2008, Kimbal ran a blog that catalogued the rocket company's progress, and reportedly sometimes cooked meals for the team. 'He did not have an operational day-to-day role,' says an early SpaceX employee. Regardless, Kimbal was listed as a corporate officer on SEC filings from 2009 to 2022. Typically corporate officers are members of a company's C-suite. Asked why Kimbal may have been listed as such in the SEC documents, Harvard Law professor Jess Fried, who says he's never seen a comparable arrangement, suggested that 'one possibility is that Elon wanted to provide an extra source of income for Kimbal.' 'It is one of the top things you worry about in a controlled company,' adds Dorothy Lund, a law professor at Columbia University. 'Will the controller use their control of the company to take things they shouldn't take, either for themselves or their friends or their siblings?' While starting The Kitchen and helping his brother's latest ventures, Kimbal also joined an early-stage venture pitching itself as a social application for web browsing, as an investor and CEO. was eventually rebranded as OneRiot – and it was a bust. In 2011, after Kimbal left, Walmart acquired it for an undisclosed amount. 'It was a fire sale, the investors made no money whatsoever' says a person familiar with the deal. Kimbal has acknowledged that joining the company was a mistake. 'It was like chewing sawdust every day,' he told Lex Fridman. It was a stressful time all around. In early 2008, Elon asked Kimbal to put what money he had into Tesla to help keep the struggling automaker afloat. Kimbal, who had joined Tesla's board in 2004, dutifully liquidated $375,000 in Apple stock and invested it in his brother's company, according to Isaacon's biography. Throughout it all, Kimbal still had his true love, The Kitchen. In 2010, he founded a nonprofit arm, The Kitchen Community (later renamed Big Green), to connect kids with nutritious foods. The Kitchen opened a second restaurant in Denver in 2012, then a third in Chicago in 2014. Last November it expanded into Austin. 'I had a really great experience with Kimbal. I learned a ton,' says Chapin Rebbe, executive general manager of The Kitchen from 2020 until earlier this year, 'He was pretty involved. I was conversing with him weekly.' All those who spoke with Forbes, including those who criticized Kimbal's abilities as a businessman, said variations of the same thing—that Kimbal is a nice guy whom people like. But Kimbal will never contradict Elon, even in private, says one former employee of OneRiot. 'If things got messy, [Kimbal] wasn't standing up fighting the good fight. He was kind of Switzerland. If tensions were high, he wasn't going to come in and be the moral savior of the situation,' the ex-employee adds. 'It's a shame. He's in a position of power to do something but he's just sitting there doing nothing.'
