Recykal: Turning India's Scrap Into a Marketplace

According to The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), India generates an estimated 62 million tonnes of waste every year, and for decades, the system that handled it operated almost entirely on informal networks, scrap dealers, kabadiwalas, and aggregators who moved material through relationships and paper ledgers rather than any traceable digital record. Less than a third of that waste was formally processed through any documented channel, according to industry estimates, with the rest moving through cash transactions that left no trail for regulators, brands, or recyclers to follow. That opacity became a genuine liability once India’s Extended Producer Responsibility rules made brands legally accountable for what happened to their packaging after the point of sale, a shift that turned an invisible logistics problem into a compliance risk with real financial consequences.

Recykal, founded in Hyderabad in 2016 by Abhay Deshpande, Abhishek Deshpande, Ekta Narain, Anirudha Jalan, Vikram Prabakar, and Sujan Parthasaradhi, set out to digitise the entire chain. To achieve this, the company built a marketplace where recyclable material could be bought, sold, and tracked with the same visibility as any other traded commodity, giving brands a paper trail for their packaging and recyclers a way to find sellers beyond their immediate geography.

Revenue Triples, Losses Shrink

According to its own disclosures, Recykal closed FY26 with gross revenue of ₹1,498 crore, up 53.2% from ₹978 crore the previous year, a jump that puts the company firmly among India’s larger cleantech operators by top-line metrics. Just as notable as the company’s top line is the bottom line. The company narrowed its losses from 6% of revenue to 4%, a sign that scale is translating into operating discipline rather than simply spending more to chase higher volumes. The company’s B2B marketplace connects buyers and sellers of recyclable material directly, while a separate software layer helps consumer brands track and document plastic and e-waste recycling to meet India’s Extended Producer Responsibility mandates, a compliance requirement that has become a meaningful revenue driver in its own right as enforcement has tightened.

A newer product line, the Deposit Return System, is seeing acceptance among a wider set of consumers across different states. Under this model, consumers pay a small refundable deposit on containers at the point of purchase and get it back in full when the empty container is returned to a collection point. Recykal is already piloting DRS across Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Bhutan, positioning the product as a behavioural nudge dressed up as a financial incentive.

From Bridge Round to Global Bet

In June, Recykal closed a $23 million bridge round from existing backers and a group of new family offices, following an earlier $45 million raise that had already brought total funding past $60 million across seven rounds. The bridge round marked a full exit for early investor Circulate Capital, which walked away with roughly five times its original investment after several years of backing the company. This successful departure provides a clear signal to the rest of the cleantech investor base that circularity bets in India can produce real returns on a reasonable timeline.

Recykal said the fresh capital will go toward three clearly stated priorities. Firstly, to expand its technology stack, secondly, to scale DRS deployments nationally across additional states, and lastly, to fund international expansion into new geographies. The third priority is where the company’s ambitions take an interesting turn.

The company is actively pursuing opportunities in Europe and the United Kingdom through a mix of organic growth, strategic partnerships, and potential acquisitions. It intends to become a buyer in its category rather than remain purely a domestic platform. Recykal has already tested its cross-border model once. In early 2025, it signed a partnership with Aramco Digital to build circular-economy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, applying its India-built playbook to a market with almost no formal recycling ecosystem.

None of this guarantees Recykal will become the global category leader it is positioning itself to be. India’s waste sector remains fragmented and heavily informal. However, competitors like Metabolic, Kabadiwalla Connect, and a growing field of EPR-compliance platforms are capitalising on the same regulatory tailwinds as Recykal, each betting that the shift from informal to formal waste handling is large enough to support more than one winner. The FY26 numbers and the bridge round together paint a picture of a company that has moved past proving that its model works in Hyderabad. It’s now testing whether the same playbook travels, first to Riyadh, and next to markets where the regulatory pressure that built Recykal’s India business hasn’t fully arrived yet.