Rainmatter Bets ₹56 Crore on Karo Sambhav's Plan to Mine Critical Minerals From E-Waste

A Nine-Year Bootstrap Finally Takes Outside Capital

Karo Sambhav, a Gurugram-based circular-economy and recycling company, has raised ₹56 crore in a pre-Series A round led by Rainmatter, the climate and impact fund backed by stockbroker Zerodha. The round, reported in the third week of June 2026, marks the company's first significant outside cheque. Founded in 2017 by Pranshu Singhal, Karo Sambhav had run as a bootstrapped organisation for roughly nine years before agreeing to take external capital — an unusually long runway for a business now positioning itself at the centre of a strategic supply-chain problem.

The company says it will use the money to scale infrastructure for recovering critical, precious and high-value materials from electronic waste and allied end-of-life streams. Its immediate focus is e-waste: the discarded phones, laptops, servers and circuit boards whose components hide recoverable copper, gold and, increasingly, the strategic metals that India would otherwise have to import.

From Compliance Plumbing to Urban Mining

Karo Sambhav began life largely as the unglamorous plumbing of India's extended-producer-responsibility regime — building reverse-logistics and collection channels so that brands could responsibly account for the electronics, batteries and packaging they put into the market. That collection-first model is what the new capital is meant to push downstream. Recovering metals from a tonne of mixed e-waste is a materials-processing challenge, not just a logistics one, and it is where the economics — and the deep-tech difficulty — actually sit.

The pivot reflects a broader shift in how recycling is being framed in India: less as waste management and more as "urban mining," the idea that the highest-grade ore for some strategic metals is now sitting in scrap heaps rather than in the ground.

Why Critical-Mineral Recovery Is a Policy Priority

The timing is not accidental. Critical minerals — the rare earths, cobalt, lithium, copper and allied metals that underpin semiconductors, electric vehicles, defence systems and renewable-energy hardware — have become a chokepoint for every country trying to build an advanced-manufacturing base, and India imports much of what it needs. New Delhi has responded with the National Critical Minerals Mission and, under the Ministry of Mines, an Incentive Scheme for Promotion of Critical Mineral Recycling aimed at building a domestic recovery industry.

Karo Sambhav says its planned recycling infrastructure has received Eligibility Status under that incentive scheme — a signal that the company intends to compete for government support as it moves from collecting waste to extracting the metals locked inside it. For a recycler, recovering even a fraction of those metals domestically is both a commercial opportunity and a small contribution to India's push for supply-chain self-reliance.

The Network Behind the Numbers

The case for backing Karo Sambhav rests on reach. The company operates two recycling facilities and says it has established collection channels across more than 50 cities in India, through which it has channelised over 150,000 metric tonnes of waste toward responsible recycling. It works not only with e-waste but also with battery waste, glass and other end-of-life material streams — a spread that matters, because a recovery business needs reliable feedstock volumes to justify investment in processing capacity.

What to Watch

The hard part is still ahead. Moving from collection to high-yield recovery of critical metals at industrial scale is a materials-science and process-engineering problem, and recovery economics are sensitive to metal prices, purity and throughput. Rainmatter's involvement suggests patient, mission-aligned capital rather than a quick exit — useful for a business whose payoff depends on building physical capacity. The questions worth tracking: how much of the critical-mineral value chain Karo Sambhav can actually capture, how quickly the Ministry of Mines incentives translate into cash, and whether "urban mining" can become a genuine pillar of India's critical-minerals strategy rather than a slogan.

Sources

• Karo Sambhav secures Rs 56 Cr from Rainmatter by Zerodha — YourStory
• Karo Sambhav raises Rs 56 Cr in pre-Series A round led by Rainmatter — Entrackr
• Karo Sambhav Gets ₹56 Cr From Rainmatter for Critical Raw Material Recovery — Outlook Business
• Zerodha's Rainmatter invests Rs 56 crore in Karo Sambhav — Indian Startup News
• India Digest: Rusk Media, Karo Sambhav raise funding — DealStreetAsia