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.
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.
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.
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........