The funding round was led by Zerodha’s investment arm Rainmatter in a mix of equity and debt

The primary use of the capital will be to scale PadCare’s recycling capacity by setting up additional processing plants

PadCare has built a proprietary technology to safely collect and recycle used sanitary pads, a waste stream that ends up in landfills or incinerators

Cleantech startup PadCare has secured $3 Mn (INR 27.2 Cr) in a pre-Series A funding round led by Zerodha’s investment arm Rainmatter. The funding round, which comprised a mix of equity and debt, also saw participation from 3one4 Capital, Brigade Group and PKRBCV Shroff Trust, alongside its existing investors Lavni Ventures and 3i Partners.

Founded in 2018 by Ajinkya Dhariya, PadCare has built a proprietary technology to safely collect and recycle used sanitary pads, a waste stream that typically ends up in landfills or incinerators.

Additionally, PadCare will allocate a portion in rebuilding its leadership team with new hires, as well as invest in its diaper recycling project, among other plans.

The startup claims to have secured an Indian patent for its recycling process, with US and European patents currently under review, positioning it as one of the few players globally attempting to close the loop on menstrual and hygiene waste.

Operating in a service model, PadCare bins are deployed at the client locations and it connects those dots to the reverse logistics system and brings them back to a centralised recycling factory.

As of today, PadCare’s services are live across 24 Indian cities, serving more than 2000 client sites, 685 individual logos and almost 4 to 5000 individual households, via different housing gated communities, Dhariya said.

On the financial side, the founder claimed that the startup has sustained EBITDA profitability over the last two years, maintaining EBITDA margins of 26%, and its PAT is around 8% in FY25.

PadCare’s fundraise comes amid growing investor and policy focus on India’s circular economy and waste management sector, which is seeing rising demand from urbanisation, stricter sustainability norms and corporate ESG mandates.

On the broader market purview, Most recently, on-demand recycling platform ScrapUncle raised INR 22 Cr (about $2.4 Mn) about a month ago, to expand its presence and back its groundwork for a future in-house e-waste recycling facility, among others.