Karo Sambhav, a platform helping brands manage electronic and plastic waste under India's Extended Producer Responsibility rules, and Padcare Labs, a sanitary-waste recycling startup, are among the nominees shortlisted for the Economic Times Startup Awards 2026's Social Enterprise category — a cohort that organisers say illustrates how Indian entrepreneurs are increasingly building businesses that pair measurable environmental or social impact with genuine commercial viability, rather than treating the two as separate pursuits.
Karo Sambhav, founded in 2017 by Pranshu Singhal, has built formal recycling networks that help major brands meet Extended Producer Responsibility mandates for electronic, battery, plastic and glass waste — while working to bring India's large informal waste-collection workforce into more structured, safer employment. The company raised ₹56 crore from Rainmatter, the investment arm founded by Zerodha's Nikhil Kamath, in a round disclosed in June 2026. Singhal has argued that India's manufacturing ambitions will increasingly depend on reliable access to critical and high-value materials already embedded in products nearing the end of their useful life — a resource opportunity as much as an environmental one, given that India is the world's third-largest generator of e-waste, producing an estimated 4.1 million metric tonnes annually, against a projected global total of 82 million tonnes by 2030.
Padcare Labs, founded in Pune by mechanical engineer Ajinkya Dhariya, traces its origins to a moment on a hike when he came across used sanitary pads discarded in a tree — an experience that led him to develop what the company describes as the world's first chemo-mechanical process to recycle used pads into reusable plastic and cellulose pulp, replacing incineration as the standard disposal method. The startup raised $3 million in a Pre-Series A round in February 2026, led by Rainmatter with participation from 3one4 Capital, Brigade REAP and PKRBCV Shroff Trust, alongside debt financing from EXIM Bank and ICICI Bank. Padcare says it plans to scale recycling capacity to 2,000 metric tonnes annually by March 2027 and has separately launched Orbit, a business-to-consumer sanitary waste management application.
The two companies sit alongside other nominees in the category, including Cornext, which supplies silage baler machines to address fodder shortages for Indian dairy farmers; Varaha, which works with smallholder farmers to generate and sell carbon credits from sustainable farming practices to global corporate buyers; and CureBay, which operates a hybrid healthcare network of tech-enabled eClinics extending medical consultations into underserved areas. All five nominees, organisers note, operate in sectors where formal infrastructure or services have historically struggled to reach.
The nominations arrive amid a broader wave of investor interest in India's recycling and circular-economy sector: tyre-recycling startup ReGrip recently raised ₹20.25 crore, waste-management platform ScrapUncle raised ₹22 crore in a pre-Series A round, and Padcare's own raise formed part of the same investment cluster — collectively signalling that capital increasingly views circularity not as a CSR-adjacent niche but as a genuine, scaling commercial category tied directly to India's raw-material security.
For both Karo Sambhav and Padcare Labs, the ET Startup Awards recognition adds visibility to a funding environment where impact-focused ventures often still depend on a mix of specialised impact investors, corporate CSR budgets and a comparatively small pool of mainstream venture capital willing to underwrite environmental infrastructure plays. Whichever nominee ultimately wins the Social Enterprise category, the shortlist itself makes a broader point: that India's circular-economy sector, once treated as a policy compliance obligation for large brands, has matured into a startup category capable of attracting serious institutional capital on its own commercial merits.
