Karo Sambhav’s ₹56 Cr Urban Mining Bet to Secure Critical Minerals Supply

For Indian manufacturers, securing critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, and rare earths has become a strategic imperative as clean energy and electronics production surges. Karo Sambhav’s ₹56 crore infusion transforms urban mining from a niche concept into a practical source of secondary raw materials, potentially reducing import reliance and insulating supply chains from geopolitical disruptions.

Karo Sambhav, a Gurugram-based circular economy startup, has raised ₹56 crore (approximately $6.7 million) in a pre-Series A funding round from Rainmatter by Zerodha, ending a nine-year bootstrap period. The company, founded in 2017 by Pranshu Singhal, plans to channel the capital into expanding its recycling infrastructure with a focus on recovering critical minerals, precious metals, and high-value materials from electronic waste. This move is a strategic inflection point for a firm that has quietly built collection networks spanning more than 50 Indian cities and channelized over 150,000 metric tonnes of waste across categories, including e-waste, batteries, and glass. The funding is not just a capital event; it signals investor confidence in urban mining as a viable pathway to address India’s growing critical mineral import dependence.

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Karo Sambhav, a Gurugram-based circular economy startup, has raised ₹56 crore (approximately $6.7 million) in a pre-Series A funding round from Rainmatter by Zerodha, ending a nine-year bootstrap period.

The global e-waste crisis is deepening, with India alone generating over 1.6 million tonnes annually, yet formal recycling penetration remains low. Karo Sambhav’s model—centered on systematic collection, responsible dismantling, and traceable recycling—tackles both the environmental hazard and the supply chain opportunity. By extracting lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, rare earth elements, and precious metals from discarded electronics, the startup effectively turns a liability into a strategic domestic resource stream. Singhal underscored this by stating, “India's manufacturing future will require reliable access to critical, precious and high-value materials. Many of these materials are already present in products that have reached the end of life.” This philosophy aligns with India’s National Critical Minerals Mission and the draft Battery Waste Management Rules, which aim to secure raw materials for the clean energy and electronics sectors.

From an industry perspective, the investment by Rainmatter—Zerodha’s sustainability-focused initiative—brings not only capital but also institutional credibility to a sector often dominated by informal players. Karo Sambhav’s patient execution over nine years, bootstrapped, allowed it to build robust processes and partnerships with enterprises for EPR (extended producer responsibility) compliance. With this funding, it now aims to deepen its processing capacity, potentially increasing the recovery of high-value materials such as gold, silver, and platinum group metals from printed circuit boards, as well as battery-grade metals. The immediate impact will be an enhanced ability to accept larger volumes of e-waste from corporate and government sources, while also exploring advanced hydrometallurgical or mechanical separation technologies.