Karo Sambhav is an Indian circular economy company that collects end-of-life products and recovers usable materials from them. The Gurugram-based startup has raised ₹56 crore in a pre-Series A round from Rainmatter, Zerodha’s sustainability and climate-focused investment arm, to expand recycling infrastructure for critical raw material recovery. The problem it’s chasing is pretty blunt: India throws out a huge amount of electronic waste, but too much of the value inside that waste still leaks through fragmented and poorly tracked recycling chains. Founded by Pranshu Singhal in 2017, Karo Sambhav is betting that better collection and traceability can turn discarded devices into a more reliable domestic source of metals and minerals.
What is Karo Sambhav and how does it work?
Karo Sambhav isn’t just a recycler, and it isn’t just a compliance vendor. It runs a producer responsibility and recycling system for brands, governments, recyclers, waste agencies, bulk consumers, and households. A technology layer tracks what gets collected, where it moves, and what happens after processing. For a customer, the workflow is concrete: set up the programme around a waste type or sector. Then route collection through the network and send material to dismantling or recycling facilities. At the end, customers receive recycling or destruction certificates plus recovery documentation.
The platform is built around traceability. It lets users customise operations by sector or waste type and generate automated compliance reports. It also cuts manual errors. Users get end-to-end visibility across the end-of-life chain. It works on web and mobile. It also handles things recyclers and operators care about, like mass balancing, secondary material tracking, collection efficiency, and stakeholder accountability.
That matters because the old way is messy. A lot of brands still juggle separate vendors for pickups, paperwork, audits, awareness drives, and final recycling. Karo Sambhav wraps those pieces together. It collects from aggregators, waste pickers, institutions, NGOs, corporates, and residential drives. Then it feeds that material into formal recycling channels instead of leaving customers to guess where their scrap ended up.
Who founded Karo Sambhav and what has it built?
How it started
Pranshu Singhal came into this market with real domain fit. His route into e-waste began with environmental engineering, then moved into the environment management division at the Confederation of Indian Industry, where he worked on industry-level problems. He later studied at Sweden’s International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics under Thomas Lindhqvist, the academic widely associated with coining the term Extended Producer Responsibility. Singhal has said he’s been working on product-related design and policy systems since 2003. That helps explain why Karo Sambhav looks like a policy-informed operating company rather than a generic recycling startup.
What the company has already built
This isn’t a fresh company trying to raise money on a theory. Karo Sambhav has grown for 9 years as a bootstrapped business, built 2 recycling facilities, and created collection channels in more than 50 Indian cities. It has also channelised over 150,000 metric tonnes of waste into responsible recycling. Its operations now cover e-waste, batteries, glass, and other end-of-life material streams, all tied back to the same traceability platform. It was also recognised by the Schwab Foundation with the Social Entrepreneur of the Year India 2021 award.
How Karo Sambhav is positioned against rivals
The competitive picture is more interesting than it first looks. One alternative is the old informal route — scrap dealers, aggregators, and fragmented disposal chains that may move material quickly but don’t give brands much transparency or compliance comfort. Another is the digital-compliance route. Recykal, for example, pitches a single-window EPR platform used by 650+ brands, focused on verified recyclers, target tracking, and audit-ready reporting.
Karo Sambhav sits somewhere between those models. It combines field collection, formal recycling infrastructure, producer responsibility execution, and software traceability in one stack. That’s different from being only a marketplace or only a processor. It could matter if customers want proof of where material came from and what secondary resources were actually recovered.
The funding round
Rainmatter made the pre-Series A investment of ₹56 crore. Karo Sambhav plans to use the money to scale high-quality recycling infrastructure aimed at recovering critical, precious, and high-value materials from e-waste first, with allied waste streams coming later. The company’s planned infrastructure has already received eligibility status under the Incentive Scheme for Promotion of Critical Mineral Recycling under the National Critical Mineral Mission. That gives this capex push a more serious policy tailwind than a lot of recycling startups get.
Why does Karo Sambhav funding matter?
This round matters because it shifts Karo Sambhav from being seen mainly as a collection-and-compliance operator to something more strategic: a company trying to build domestic recovery capacity for materials India otherwise imports. That’s a harder business. It’s more capital intensive. And it’s also where the upside is, because critical materials are the real prize inside e-waste.
Rainmatter’s thesis is clear from Viraj Joshi’s statement. He called Karo Sambhav a company with “patient execution and systems-level impact,” which is investor language for: this team has been grinding in an ugly, fragmented sector and actually built operating muscle. That’s not glamorous. But in recycling, boring execution is the moat.
There’s also a customer angle here. If Karo Sambhav can move from traceable waste channelisation to stronger material recovery, brands and manufacturers get more than clean compliance files. They get a shot at more resilient supply chains for metals that feed electronics, batteries, mobility, and industrial equipment. Singhal’s point is simple: many of those materials are already sitting inside products that have reached end of life.
How big is India’s e-waste and critical mineral market?
India is already the world’s 3rd-largest generator of e-waste, with an estimated 4.1 million metric tonnes produced every year. Globally, annual e-waste generation is expected to hit 82 million tonnes by 2030. So this isn’t some niche waste stream. It’s a giant and growing stockpile of copper, gold, lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, rare earths, and other inputs that modern manufacturing depends on.
Policy is catching up fast. The Ministry of Mines said on April 30, 2026 that 58 companies had been approved as eligible participants under the critical mineral recycling incentive scheme, which carries a ₹1,500 crore outlay under the National Critical Mineral Mission. The scheme was notified on October 2, 2025, and the approved companies together pledged about 850 KTPA of capacity and roughly ₹5,000 crore of investment. Critical mineral recycling has moved from climate talking point to industrial policy priority.
Private capital is moving the same way. Recycling-focused startups including ScrapUncle, ReGrip, and PadCare Labs have all announced fresh funding, while states such as Haryana are drafting e-waste recycling policies of their own. That doesn’t mean every company in the category will win. But Karo Sambhav is raising into a market where regulation, investor appetite, and supply-chain anxiety are lining up at once.
Conclusion
Karo Sambhav has spent years building the unsexy parts of recycling — collection networks, compliance workflows, formal processing, and traceability. Now it’s using ₹56 crore from Rainmatter to push further upstream into critical raw material recovery, where the economics and national importance are both bigger.
The next thing to watch is whether Karo Sambhav can turn that policy eligibility and operating base into commissioned recovery capacity — and then prove, with actual output, that India’s e-waste pile can become a serious urban mine.
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FAQ
- What funding did Karo Sambhav raise? Karo Sambhav raised ₹56 crore in a pre-Series A round announced on June 18, 2026. The investor was Rainmatter by Zerodha, and the company said the capital will be used to expand recycling infrastructure for critical raw material recovery from e-waste and related waste streams.
- How does Karo Sambhav work? Karo Sambhav runs a mix of collection operations and recycling execution. It also provides digital traceability. Customers can structure programmes by waste type, route material through formal collection and recycling channels, and receive automated compliance reporting along with recycling or destruction certificates and material recovery records.
- Who is Pranshu Singhal, the founder of Karo Sambhav? Pranshu Singhal is the founder and CEO of Karo Sambhav, and his background is unusually aligned with the business. He studied environmental engineering, worked in the Confederation of Indian Industry’s environment management division, and later studied at Sweden’s International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics, where Extended Producer Responsibility became a central part of his work.
- Is Karo Sambhav an e-waste recycling company or an EPR platform? It’s both. Karo Sambhav operates recycling facilities and collection channels, but it also runs a technology platform for EPR compliance, traceability, and reporting across e-waste, batteries, glass, and other end-of-life material streams.
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