India's Recycling Problem Has a Revenue Number. It's ₹1,498 Crore — and Growing.
There is a way to talk about waste management that makes it sound like a moral imperative wearing a business model. Circular economy companies often lead with the planet and then arrive at the unit economics. Recykal's story runs in a different sequence.
Start with the number: ₹1,498 crore in gross revenue in FY26. That is a 53.2% increase over ₹978 crore in FY25. It is the financial output of a Hyderabad-based technology platform that has spent a decade building the digital infrastructure that connects every actor in India's waste recycling system — brands managing Extended Producer Responsibility compliance, recyclers seeking raw material supply, aggregators collecting from households and businesses, and increasingly, government bodies implementing Deposit Return Systems.
The conviction that produced that number belongs to Abhay Deshpande, co-founder and CEO of Recykal, who has articulated it in a single sentence that also happens to be the company's operating thesis:
On June 20, 2026, Recykal announced it had raised $23 million in a bridge round — comprising a combination of primary and secondary capital from existing investors and select new family offices. The primary component was $17.6 million. The secondary component was $5.4 million. The round was led by Ajay Parekh, vice chairman of Pidilite Industries, who invested ₹30 crore, and also saw participation from Biological E Ltd. RoC filings accessed by Inc42 show the capital was raised across two tranches — ₹128 crore in February 2026 and ₹38.4 crore in June — through 35,971 Series D compulsory convertible preference shares at ₹46,275 apiece.
What Recykal Has Built — and Why the Technology Framing Matters
Recykal was founded in 2016 — initially as a consumer-facing app called Uzed for household recycling — before co-founder Abhay Deshpande made a strategic pivot that proved prescient: when India implemented Extended Producer Responsibility mandates for electronic waste and plastic waste, the compliance burden fell on the brands generating that waste, and they needed traceable, auditable recycling infrastructure to meet it.
Recykal pivoted to B2B and built the platform that those brands needed.
Today, Recykal operates across three interconnected products.
The B2B Open Marketplace connects waste generators — brands, businesses, hotels, RWAs, informal aggregators — with the recyclers who can process their material. For India's recyclers, this platform replaces a fragmented, relationship-dependent procurement process with a digitised supply chain. For brands, it provides the traceability documentation required for EPR compliance — every transaction recorded, every material type logged, every recycler verified. Recykal's marketplace processes across plastic, e-waste, batteries, tyres, glass, and other end-of-life material streams.
SaaS compliance solutions enable brands to track and trace their plastic and e-waste recycling to meet regulatory mandates. As EPR requirements tighten across India — and as the government adds new material categories and increases compliance targets — the software layer that sits above the marketplace becomes increasingly essential. Brands that are managing EPR compliance across multiple material streams need reporting infrastructure that can aggregate, verify, and present their recycling data in the format that regulators require.
Deposit Return Systems is the newest and most strategically significant product — and the primary focus of the $23 million capital deployment.
The Deposit Return System — What It Is and Why It Is the Next Frontier
A Deposit Return System is a simple mechanism with complex infrastructure requirements. When a consumer purchases a beverage in a bottle or can, they pay a small refundable deposit on the container. When they return the empty container to a collection point — a retail store, a reverse vending machine, a designated drop-off — the deposit is refunded. The mechanism dramatically increases container return rates, which dramatically increases recycling rates for the material in question.
DRS programmes have been operating in Europe and parts of the United States for decades. Germany's Pfand system, for example, achieves return rates of over 97% for PET bottles and cans. India does not yet have a national DRS framework, but several states and the central government are actively developing one, and several brands and government bodies are running pilots.
Recykal is not just participating in those pilots. It is building the infrastructure that makes them work.
Its DRS technology stack includes reverse vending machines — the physical kiosks that accept and verify returned containers — combined with a digital clearinghouse that tracks every returned container, verifies its validity, processes the deposit refund, and generates the data trail that brands and regulators need. It also provides the reverse logistics infrastructure that moves collected containers from the point of return to the recycler, and the consumer engagement tools that drive adoption of the return behaviour.
Recykal is currently piloting DRS across Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu within India, and has extended into Bhutan — its first cross-border deployment. The operational and technological foundations built through these pilots are the product that Recykal believes can travel internationally.
The Global Play — Europe, the UK, and Beyond
The international expansion ambition is the most significant strategic signal in the $23 million round — and it is backed by a track record that India alone cannot provide.
In March 2025, Recykal and Aramco Digital announced a partnership to drive AI-powered circular economy solutions in Saudi Arabia. That partnership represents the first significant evidence that Recykal's platform has been validated in a market outside India — and that the technology is portable to different regulatory and market contexts.
Europe and the United Kingdom are the next targets. Both markets have mandatory DRS frameworks already in place or in advanced implementation: the UK launched its national DRS scheme in 2027 target timeline, Scotland has been running a DRS programme, Germany's Pfand system is decades established, and multiple EU member states have introduced or are introducing deposit-based container return schemes under the EU Single-Use Plastics Directive.
These are markets with regulatory mandates already in place, consumer behaviour around container return already established or actively being shaped, and a significant gap in the digital infrastructure required to make the DRS system work efficiently at national scale. The clearinghouse technology, the reverse logistics coordination, the brand compliance reporting — these are the technology gaps that Recykal's existing platform is designed to fill.
"Digital backbone for a globally connected circular economy." Not a local compliance tool. Not an India-specific marketplace. A globally connected infrastructure layer for the circular economy — the ambition of a company that has spent a decade building the components and is now attempting to assemble them into a platform that operates at planetary scale.
The Moment This Round Is Entering
The Recykal bridge round is arriving at a specific and consequential moment in India's waste management and circular economy landscape.
India's waste recycling services market is projected to reach $1.5 billion by 2031. The government's National Critical Minerals Mission — which has allocated ₹1,500 crore to incentivise critical mineral recycling from e-waste — is building demand for exactly the kind of traceability and compliance infrastructure that Recykal provides. The EPR framework is tightening across plastic, e-waste, battery, and tyre waste categories, expanding the addressable compliance market with each regulatory update.
At the same time, India's own DRS regulatory development is accelerating. Multiple states are running pilots. The central government is watching the results. The political and commercial momentum for a national deposit return framework is building — and the company that has the most advanced DRS technology stack, the most operational pilots, and the most brand and government relationships in that space is Recykal.
Karo Sambhav — also based in the circular economy, also recently funded by Rainmatter — is a complementary player in the same ecosystem, focused on physical recycling infrastructure for e-waste and critical minerals. The two companies represent different layers of the same stack: Karo Sambhav builds the physical recovery capacity; Recykal builds the digital infrastructure that makes that capacity traceable, auditable, and connected to the brands and governments that need to account for it.
India's circular economy is not a single company's problem to solve. It is a systems problem. And Recykal's conviction — that the circular economy is fundamentally a technology problem — is the most commercially validated answer to that systems problem that India has produced so far.
₹1,498 crore in gross revenue says so. 53% year-on-year growth says so. Pilots in five states and Bhutan and a partnership with Aramco Digital say so. And $23 million heading toward Europe and the UK says so.
