Circolife, a subscription-based cooling platform founded by Abhishek Murarka, Tushar Patil and Devanshu Mishra, has raised $4.5 million, or about Rs 40.45 crore, in a pre-Series A round anchored by entrepreneur Bharat Jaisinghani. The round, announced September 9, also drew participation from gaming entrepreneur Nitish Mittersain, Intelliquity Ventures, Sumit Jalan, Siddharth and Anand Ladsariya, Anant Goenka, Sky Impact Capital, and the S N Damani and Vyom Wealth family offices.
The company operates what it calls a cooling-as-a-service model, offering businesses subscription-based access to air-conditioning units rather than requiring upfront capital purchase, bundled with connected sensors that enable predictive maintenance and usage-based servicing. According to the company, it currently runs about 10,000 active subscriptions across five Indian cities and is targeting 40,000 units within 24 months, backed by in-house service teams and refurbishing facilities in Mumbai and Delhi.
Circolife's model sits at the intersection of two pressing Indian infrastructure themes: rapidly rising cooling demand driven by warming summers and expanding commercial real estate, and the environmental cost of inefficient, poorly maintained air-conditioning fleets that consume more energy than necessary over their operating lives. By retaining ownership of the hardware and using connected sensors to monitor performance, the company argues it can extend equipment life, cut energy waste and reduce refrigerant leakage relative to conventional ownership models where maintenance is often deferred or neglected.
The proceeds from the round will fund fleet expansion, a national rollout beyond its current five-city footprint, and further development of its AI-augmented IoT platform, the company said. Cooling-as-a-service ventures have started to attract growing investor interest across South and Southeast Asia as commercial tenants look to convert capital expenditure on cooling infrastructure into predictable operating expenses, particularly amid rising real estate and construction financing costs.
India's cooling economy is widely expected to expand sharply over the coming decade, driven by climbing average temperatures, rising middle-class incomes, and an expanding services and retail economy that depends on reliable indoor climate control. Policymakers have flagged sustainable cooling as a strategic priority given its dual implications for public health during heatwaves and for national electricity demand, which spikes sharply during peak summer cooling load.
For investors, the appeal of businesses like Circolife lies in combining hardware-adjacent recurring revenue with a genuine sustainability narrative — a combination increasingly sought after in climate-tech portfolios that have grown wary of pure hardware plays with thin margins. As Circolife pushes toward its next stage of growth, its ability to maintain service quality across a rapidly expanding geographic footprint, rather than capital availability alone, is likely to determine how quickly it can convert its current base into a nationally scaled platform.
Climate-tech investors tracking the Indian market have increasingly flagged cooling as one of the country's most consequential and underinvested sustainability categories, given projections that India's demand for space cooling could multiply several times over the coming decades as incomes rise and urban heat exposure intensifies. Ventures like Circolife that combine hardware efficiency with a recurring-revenue business model are increasingly viewed as a template other emerging-market cooling businesses may look to replicate.
The involvement of family offices such as S N Damani and Vyom Wealth alongside more conventional venture names also points to a broadening base of domestic capital willing to back infrastructure-adjacent climate ventures, a trend that could meaningfully expand the funding options available to Indian climate-tech founders who have historically had to lean more heavily on international impact capital.
Whether Circolife can maintain the same standard of installation quality and after-sales service as it scales beyond its current five-city base will be closely watched, given that cooling-as-a-service businesses depend heavily on customer trust in ongoing maintenance reliability, a factor that has proven decisive for the long-term retention economics of comparable subscription hardware businesses in adjacent categories.
