Minimac Systems Raises ₹30 Crore to Turn Industrial Oil Into a Circular Resource, Not Waste

Minimac Systems has raised ₹30 crore in a pre-Series A round led by Rainmatter, the climate and deep-tech investment arm backed by Zerodha, with other investors participating. The Pune-founded company has spent more than a decade building a quieter kind of industrial deep tech: instead of a factory shipping its used lubricant oil off-site for disposal or centralised re-refining, Minimac brings a mobile treatment unit to the factory floor and restores the oil where it sits.

An old industrial problem, treated as an engineering problem

Industrial machinery — compressors, turbines, hydraulic systems, gearboxes — runs on lubricants that degrade over time as they pick up moisture, particulate contamination and oxidation byproducts. The conventional response is to drain and replace the oil on a schedule, treating it as a consumable to be disposed of rather than an asset to be maintained. That habit is expensive, generates a steady stream of hazardous waste oil, and — because degraded lubricant is a leading contributor to unplanned machinery failure — quietly drives a meaningful share of industrial downtime.

Minimac Systems, founded in 2012 by IIM Indore alumnus Anshuman Agrawal, built its business on treating that degraded oil as recoverable rather than disposable. Its core offering, Recycling on Wheels, deploys mobile, miniaturised fluid-treatment systems — with processing capacities ranging from around 10 litres a minute up to 4,000 litres a minute — directly at a client's industrial site. The unit tests and restores the lubricant's properties on the spot, and the oil goes back into service in the same machine rather than being trucked away and replaced with virgin product.

Scale, quietly built over a decade

By the company's own account, Minimac has deployed more than 2,500 of these miniaturised treatment systems across over 2,200 industrial assets, with a combined installed processing capacity exceeding 300,000 litres per minute, and has completed more than 2,000 projects since its founding. That is a large operating footprint for a company that has stayed largely out of the venture-funded spotlight until now — a reminder that not every deep-tech company chasing India's industrial base builds a flashy demo; some spend a decade quietly instrumenting factory floors instead.

What the new capital is for

The pre-Series A round will fund three things, according to the company: continued R&D in miniaturised treatment infrastructure and fluid analytics, automation of its mobile treatment fleet, and expansion of Recycling on Wheels through regional hubs across India's major industrial clusters, reducing how far a mobile unit has to travel to reach a client site. Minimac is also using the capital to build out a subscription-style Lubricants-as-a-Service model — shifting customers from a one-off treatment purchase to an ongoing service relationship where Minimac is responsible for keeping a factory's lubricant inventory in spec over time, rather than being called in only after a problem shows up.

That shift matters commercially: a service model gives Minimac recurring revenue and a reason to stay engaged with a client's equipment continuously, which in turn generates the kind of longitudinal fluid-condition data — the fleet automation and analytics layer the company says it wants to build with this round — that a one-off treatment call never would.

Why a stock-broking company's investment arm is backing an oil-recycling startup

Rainmatter, Zerodha's investment vehicle, has built a public thesis around climate and deep-tech bets that look unglamorous next to consumer software but sit on large, measurable resource-efficiency gains — the same logic that has led it to back companies working on liquid cooling for data centres and pipeline robotics elsewhere in India's industrial-tech landscape. Industrial lubricant is a fitting addition to that portfolio: India's manufacturing base consumes a large and growing volume of lubricant oil every year, most of it still treated as a disposable input rather than a resource to be managed, and a company that can measurably extend oil life and cut virgin-oil purchase volumes at scale offers a fairly direct emissions and cost argument that doesn't require betting on an unproven technology curve.

Sources

• Rainmatter leads Rs 30 Cr pre-Series A round in Minimac Systems — Entrackr
• Minimac Systems Raises ₹30 Cr To Scale Lubricant Recycling Infrastructure — Inc42
• Deeptech startup Minimac Systems raises Rs 30 crore from Zerodha's Rainmatter, other investors — Indian Startup News
• Minimac Systems Raises Rs. 30 Crore to Make Industrial Oil Cleaner, Reusable and Less Wasteful — Newskart