A week in Mumbai
Our week in Mumbai was dominated by monsoon rains and meetings with India’s leading climate investors. Through it all, we also spoke to many more climate startup founders. Keep reading to learn about EVs, solar and waste management startups!
SolarSquare. Founder: Shreya Mishra. Website: https://solarsquare.in/
SolarSquare is India’s leading D2C rooftop solar company. Unlike many of the other startups we have spoken to, SolarSquare started off as a B2B company before switching to a D2C model. During the early days of the business, the founders realized that there was a huge market opportunity in providing affordable solar panels to low-mid income families. The technology had reached a point where the economics of owning a solar panel was a slam dunk, and the challenge was simply customer education. The founders pivoted their business to focus on these consumers, and have been tremendously successful. Today SolarSquare is present in 14,000 homes in 10 cities, and 70% of its customers don’t own a car.
Zypp. Founder: Akash Gupta. Website: https://zypp.app/
Zypp started in 2017 as a D2C firm selling 2-wheeler EVs directly to consumers. However, Akash quickly realized that the B2B model would be more effective and pivoted the company to focus on providing electric fleets for large Indian businesses (e.g., Flipkart, Blinkit) instead. Now, Zypp’s mission is to make last mile logistics as sustainable and emission free as possible. Since moving to a B2B model, a large part of Zypp’s success has been the way they are able to monitor their fleets. Zypp’s unique IoT and AI enabled solutions allows them to keep fleet utilization high, and maintenance costs low. This keeps their lower carbon transport on the roads longer. During our time in India (and especially Delhi), we could barely walk 100 meters without passing a Zypp scooter! Today Zypp operates one of the largest fleets of 2-wheeler EVs in India.
Lucro. Founder: Ujwal Desai. Website: https://www.lucro.in/
Lucro is one of the largest plastic waste recycling companies in India. Founded by Ujwal Desai, Lucro has seen tremendous success - with revenues increasing nearly 20x since 2020. A large part of this success has been driven by an innovative circular economy model that Lucro developed. First, they collect plastic waste from consumers themselves, using an extensive network of waste pickers. Then they use a proprietary manufacturing process to convert this plastic into granules. These granules are sold to global FMCG companies like Pepsico and Unilever, both within India and overseas too. Finally these plastic granules are used by these companies to build their own packaging and products (e.g., bottles). Since being founded, Lucro has collect nearly 29,000 tons of plastic waste across 30 cities in India.
Dharaksha. Founder: Arpit Dhupar. Website: https://www.dharaksha.com/
India is a country perfect for innovations around the circular economy. Agricultural waste in particular is a huge challenge given the vast amount of Indians involved in it; in 2021, agriculture employed around 50% of India’s workforce. That was Arpit’s inspiration behind Dharaksha. With Dharaksha, Arpit is building cleaner and sustainable packaging material using biomass. Similar to another company we featured earlier (Strawcture), Dharaksha re-uses agri waste that would otherwise be burned by farmers. The packaging materials are typically used by electronics companies, and are more durable and protective than traditional material - although at the moment they are 2x the cost. The ambition is to begin manufacturing at scale, which will bring costs more in line with traditional packaging materials.
Gofig. Founder: Gaurav Shah. Website: https://gofig.in/
Gofig is a Pune based sustainable grocery startup. They aim to reduce waste by providing low shelf life foods and cosmetics at heavily discounted prices. In India, 40% of food produced goes to waste. A large driver of this is items that are surplus or close to expiry date for existing grocers. Food or cosmetic products that are close to expiry date typically do not sell due to lack of consumer trust. Gofig sells these products - which would otherwise go to waste - to value conscious and green customers at a discount to the typical package price. The result is a win-win: consumers get cheaper products, sellers make some revenue, and food waste is reduced! Gofig is founded by Gaurav Shah and Disha Shah, who saw a similar idea in Hong Kong and thought to bring it to the Indian market!