Recykal Bags $22 Mn From Morgan Stanley For Its SaaS Tool For Waste Management

Cloud-based waste management and processing startup Recykal has raised $22 Mn (approx INR 165 Cr) in a round led by Morgan Stanley India. The round also saw participation from existing investors Singapore-based Circulate Capital, Vellayan Subbiah and Arun Venkatachalam.

The startup plans to use the funds to scale its B2B services across the country. It also plans to double down its hiring in various roles and build hyperlocal waste processing infrastructures across the country.

Founded in 2016 by Abhishek Deshpande, the Hyderabad-based startup is a B2B marketplace for waste management. Recykal provides cloud-based solutions to its clients that enables transparent and traceable material flows in waste.

Here’s how it works. Through the marketplace, Recykal allows users to buy and sell recyclable items like plastics, paper, e-wastes etc. It connects large waste generators such as industries, organisations, colleges to processors and other players in the segment to address the demand-supply mismatch; i.e, recyclers can buy waste from across the country, while Recykal manages the logistics as well as the documentation, with 100% transparency via its dashboard.

Its current clients include Pidilite, P&G, Amul, Adani, Panasonic, among others. The idea started out as an app to recycle domestic waste, but Recykal later focussed on waste tracking solutions serving its unit economics. With hyperlocal waste processing infrastructure, the startup looks back to serve domestic as well as commercial needs.

This is the startup’s second institutional round following a $4 Mn seed round in 2020. Recykal had revenue of INR 1.8 Cr in FY19 with an ARR of INR 220 Cr in FY22, Deshpande said in a statement.

According to the startup, the waste management industry is highly fragmented and informal. Plastic and other kinds of packing material using companies generate over $100 Bn worth of waste every year. The Indian ecommerce packaging market alone is estimated to reach $975.4 Mn by 2025, growing at 13.8% annually, according to IBEF.

The startup competes with the likes of electronic waste management startup Attero, Hyderabad-based Banyan Nation, plastic waste upcycling startup Lucro Plastecycle, decentralised waste management solution Sampurna(e)arth, among others.

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