Best of 2025: The Indian Startups Fixing Water, Energy, Waste & Work for Millions

Someone gathered trash from a beach. Someone lifted a solar panel into place on a narrow street. Someone rolled a tech bus into a village where children had never seen a drone.

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If 2025 showed us anything, it’s that India’s best ideas are no longer coming just from boardrooms but from beaches, workshops, buses, farms, and small-town garages. This year, startups didn’t just respond to challenges — they leapt ahead of them. The result? A future that looks brighter, cleaner, and more inclusive than ever.

Beyond chasing valuations, these startup founders are solving the problems right outside their windows.

Here are 10 stories of entrepreneurship with heart that shaped the way we looked at innovation in 2025.

1. Siddharth A K: Giving ocean waste a second life

For Siddharth A K, beach clean-ups began as childhood rituals with his mother and later became his way of finding a sense of grounding after losing her. The turning point came when he returned home after a cleanup and visited the same beach the very next day, only to find it covered in fresh litter again. It became clear that collection alone would never be enough.

Siddharth sold his mixer, grinder, fridge, sofa, and more to fund months of R&D before teaming up with friends Sooraj Verma and Alvin George to launch Carbon & Whale in 2022. Today, their recycled plastic benches and tiles stand in metro stations, malls, and public spaces across Kerala and Bengaluru. The trio has diverted 10,000 kg of plastic so far and aims to clear one million kilograms from Kerala’s coastline.

Read more about their journey here.

2. Navkaran Singh Bagga: Pulling drinking water straight from the air 

Navkaran Singh Bagga grew up taking apart electronics in his Kolkata home, but the water crisis pushed him towards a different kind of invention. He wondered why a country surrounded by humidity was still running out of drinking water. In 2017, he built Akvo, a system that turns air into clean, mineral-balanced water.

Since the first machine went commercial in 2018, Akvo has installed over 2,000 units across six Indian cities and 15 countries, producing more than 100 million litres without touching a drop of groundwater. From factories to schools and remote sites, the machines offer a dependable, decentralised answer to water scarcity.

Read more about their work here.

3. Shani Pandya: Turning plastic waste into solar trees

Shani Pandya’s journey began with a simple question: why should solar power demand acres of land? In 2018, after seeing how space constraints held back Gandhinagar’s solar goals, he set out to redesign how cities harness energy. The effort came with sacrifice — he broke his mutual funds and even mortgaged his home to keep the idea alive.

His solar trees now fit up to 45 panels on a single pole, shrinking land use from 2,200 sq ft to just 2 sq ft. With over 150 installations across India and a turnover rising from Rs 7 crore to a projected Rs 13 crore, Shani is proving that clean energy can thrive even in the tightest urban corners.

Read more about his innovation here.

4. Rupankar Bhattacharjee and Aniket Dhar: Making beautiful paper from water hyacinth

The idea for Kumbhi Kagaz began in an unexpected moment. During a wildlife rescue, Rupankar Bhattacharjee (27) learnt how water hyacinth was choking Assam’s wetlands, and the thought stayed with him. At home during the lockdown, he began pulling the plant apart fibre by fibre, testing whether it could turn into paper. When he shared his early prototypes with friend Aniket Dhar (24), the two decided to build a solution that felt both local and necessary.

Today, their startup has processed 92 tonnes of water hyacinth into chemical-free, tree-free paper and recorded Rs 20 lakh in sales. In a state where the weed is often seen as a nuisance, they have turned it into work, income, and a material that artists and businesses are eager to use.

Read their story here.

5. Ravi Kaushik: Turning your AC into an air purifier

When Delhi’s air grows thick every winter, most people focus on masks and outdoor alerts. Ravi Kaushik noticed something different — the air inside homes was often no better. Along with a small team from IIT Kanpur and IISc Bengaluru, he built AIRTH, a simple module that fits onto regular split ACs and filters out pollutants as tiny as 0.3 microns.

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Costing under Rs 3,000, the device has already upgraded more than 25,000 ACs and given families a practical way to breathe cleaner air without investing in bulky purifiers.

6. Chandrashekhar Mandal: Taking labour chowks online

The idea for Digital Labour Chowk began on a rainy day in Delhi, when Chandrashekhar Mandal watched daily wage workers scramble for shelter outside his office while he sipped coffee on a balcony. Memories of his relatives doing the same in Bihar never really left him. In 2020, he quit his finance job with Rs 20,000 in hand and started building a “LinkedIn for blue-collar workers”.

Today, over one lakh workers use the platform to find jobs closer to home, while hundreds of contractors and companies hire masons, carpenters, painters, and more with a few taps. The app is free for workers and offers them something many never had before: visibility, choice, and a little more control over their working lives.

Read about his work here.

7. Jayesh, Ganesh and Vaibhav Pakhale: ‘Digital kabadiwalas’ making recycling easy

Scrapdeal began with a simple frustration. Pune student Jayesh Pakhale could not understand why, in a world of delivery apps, people still struggled to dispose of scrap responsibly. He started collecting waste with his pocket money, then pulled his brothers Ganesh and Vaibhav into the idea. Together, they built a bootstrapped platform that works like a familiar delivery app, only this time the pickup is for newspapers, e-waste, old tyres, and metal.

The business has grown into a Rs 2 crore operation with a 4,000 sq ft warehouse, 30 staff, and tie-ups with over 500 housing societies. Scrapdeal has recycled around 10 lakh kg of waste so far, offers transparent weighing and instant digital payments, and keeps customers coming back with nearly 90 percent retention.

Read more about their work here. 

8. Prince Shukla: Building sustainable farming tools for farmers

When COVID-19 cut short his plans in Bengaluru, 24-year-old Prince Shukla returned to his village in Bihar feeling stuck. Back home, he saw the same problems he had grown up around: low-quality seeds, limited tools, and farmers who worked hard yet stayed on the edge. He borrowed Rs 1 lakh from his father and started AGRATE to fix what he could from within the system.

AGRATE now supplies farmers with better seeds, drip irrigation, and eco-friendly fertilisers, and backs this with training in grafting, multi-cropping, and sustainable practices. The venture has supported more than 10,000 farmers and built a Rs 2.5 crore turnover, with partnerships that connect growers to companies like ITC, Godrej, and Parle.

Read about his initiative here.

9. Vikram Goel and Rajvinder Kaur: Making heart procedures more affordable?

For Chandigarh-based entrepreneur Rajvinder Kaur, the loss of her husband to a cardiac arrest turned into a lifelong question: why is timely, affordable heart care out of reach for so many families? Along with co-founder Vikram Goel, she set up Incredible Devices and began working on a safer way to reuse costly catheters. In 2012, they started developing a fully automated Catheter Reprocessing System that hospitals could trust.

The machine cleans and sterilises single-use angiography and angioplasty catheters to medical standards and cuts their cost by up to 99 percent, from Rs 1,500–2,000 to about Rs 20–30. For hospitals serving low-income patients, this difference can decide whether a life-saving procedure is possible at all.

10. Krovvidi Madhulash Babu: Taking a solar-powered tech lab to village schools

In Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, children in government schools now step into a bus and find themselves surrounded by drones, robots, and a tiny planetarium. That bus is FLOW, the Futuristic Lab On Wheels, created by Hyderabad-based startup Edodwaja. Designed by founder Krovvidi Madhulash Babu and incubated at Sri Padmavati Mahila Visvavidyalayam’s SSIIE-TBI, the lab runs on solar power and folds out into zones for AR/VR, IoT, AI/ML, and 3D printing.

The bus hosts around 35 students at a time and focuses on hands-on sessions rather than lectures. Since its launch in June 2024, FLOW has reached more than 45,000 students in Telangana, and its Kalam Spoorthi Yatra has engaged another 17,000 children with digital tech and science, often for the very first time.