Chakr Innovation makes a device that clips onto a diesel generator’s exhaust pipe and turns the soot into printer ink. That sounds like a science-fair curiosity, not a business — yet by September 2025 the Gurugram-based company had pulled in $23 million (₹193.5 crore) in a single funding round led by growth-stage investor Iron Pillar, nine years after three IIT Delhi graduates first noticed a sugarcane-juice stall wall stained black by a generator’s exhaust.
The stranger twist is in the numbers, not the soot. In FY24, Chakr posted its first profitable year — ₹124.8 crore in revenue and ₹9.5 crore in profit, as per Inc42’s Datalabs financial tracker. A year later, revenue jumped 51.5% to ₹189.0 crore, but profit after tax fell 63% to ₹3.6 crore. A company can grow fast and get less profitable in the same year, and Chakr’s FY25 filing is a clean illustration of exactly how that happens.
Quick facts
| Company | Chakr Innovation Private Limited (CIN U74999DL2016PTC302071) |
| Founded | 24 June 2016, New Delhi (per MCA incorporation record via Tofler) |
| Founder(s) | Kushagra Srivastava (CEO), Arpit Dhupar (CTO), Bharti Singhla and Prateek Sachan (both since departed) — all IIT Delhi alumni |
| Businesses | Retrofit emission-control devices for diesel generators (Chakr Shield), NOx reduction, dust suppression, IoT-based generator monitoring, dual-fuel kits, and aluminium-air battery R&D |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹189.0 crore, FY25, up 51.5% year-on-year (Inc42 Datalabs) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | ₹3.6 crore profit after tax, FY25, down 63% year-on-year (Inc42 Datalabs) |
| Listed | Private — no stock exchange listing |
| Market value / last valuation | Reported as undisclosed by Entrackr at the September 2025 Series C; separately estimated at $115 million (~₹1,104 crore, converted at $1≈₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026) by Inc42’s data desk |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Kushagra Srivastava (CEO); institutional backers include Iron Pillar, SBI Cap Ventures’ Neev Fund, ONGC Startup Fund, Indian Angel Network and Inflexor Ventures |
What they do
Chakr Innovation builds hardware that sits on the exhaust of diesel generators and captures the pollution before it reaches the air. Its flagship product, Chakr Shield, is a Retrofit Emission Control Device (RECD) that clamps onto an existing generator without needing to replace the engine, and the company states it cuts particulate matter emissions by more than 80% — a figure repeated across its Series C coverage in Entrackr and Evertiq (September 2025). The soot it captures is processed into carbon-black ink and paint, sold under Chakr’s own consumer-facing brand. Around that core device the company has built out a family of related products: Chakr DeNOx (nitrogen-oxide reduction), Chakr DeSmog (construction dust suppression), a Dual Fuel Kit that lets a diesel generator run partly on natural gas, Chakr GenSense (IoT generator monitoring), and — its newest bet — an aluminium-air battery line aimed at energy storage, positioned as an alternative to lithium-ion chemistry (company website, chakr.in, and Iron Pillar’s Series C statement, September 2025). Customers span manufacturing, real estate, data centres, hospitality, healthcare and infrastructure; named clients reported by PrivateCircle’s company profile include ONGC, JSW Cement, Hindustan Petroleum and Hitachi Astemo. By September 2025 the company said it had over 5,000 installations across more than 2,000 customers (Entrackr, September 2025).
The origin
The idea did not start in a lab. Arpit Dhupar, then a recent IIT Delhi graduate, was buying sugarcane juice at a roadside stall when he noticed the wall behind the vendor’s diesel generator had turned black with soot from the exhaust pipe, according to the founding account reported by The Better India. His reaction, as recounted there, was practical rather than environmental: if the exhaust could stain a wall black, the pigment in it could be captured and reused — as ink, or as paint. That single observation became Chakr Shield. Dhupar, Kushagra Srivastava and Prateek Sachan — all IIT Delhi engineers — spent roughly a year building and testing the concept before Chakr Innovation was incorporated in June 2016 (Tofler; The Better India). Srivastava has said in interviews collected by Indiaspora that growing up in Delhi and watching people close to him affected by the city’s air pushed him toward the problem; Bharti Singhla, who joined as a co-founder, brought a chemical-engineering background and a stint in management consulting before later pursuing an MBA-MS in Environment at Stanford. The team’s pitch was unusual for climate hardware at the time: rather than asking polluters to replace equipment, retrofit an emission-control box onto the diesel generators that were already running across Delhi NCR’s telecom towers, factories and construction sites.
The struggle years
The first year was run without a stable source of capital, according to The Better India’s 2016 account of the company’s early pilot — the founders built and installed roughly 30 devices across NCR telecom towers, FMCG plants and real-estate sites before there was a business model to support the work, financing it through grants, fellowships and prize money rather than institutional funding. Chakr won the University of Chicago Urban Labs India Challenge that year and picked up early recognition from India’s Department of Science and Technology, the Echoing Green fellowship programme, Indian Oil Corporation and FICCI (The Better India; iamrenew.com, 2018 milestone list) — useful for credibility, but not revenue. A first institutional round, an undisclosed pre-Series A from IDFC-Parampara Fund, came only in March 2018, almost two years after incorporation (Tracxn funding data).
The founding team also did not stay intact. Bharti Singhla left her operating role at Chakr around 2021 to pursue an MBA-MS at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and has since moved into venture investing at Momentum Capital; Prateek Sachan, the company’s co-founder and one-time chief operating officer, also departed to co-found a separate venture, The New Art (Tracxn company profile, which lists both as “Former Co-Founder”). A cleantech hardware company losing two of its four founders within its first five years is exactly the kind of attrition investors watch closely, and it left Srivastava and Dhupar to carry the company through its next phase alone. Then came a second, external shock: when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, commercial and industrial activity — the demand base for diesel generators — slowed sharply, and Chakr had to find a way to keep its engineering team relevant to a market that had gone quiet. Its answer was a pivot into an adjacent public-health problem: on 10 July 2020, IIT Delhi announced that its incubated startup Chakr Innovation had launched “Chakr DeCoV,” an ozone-based cabinet that decontaminates N95 masks in 90 minutes for up to ten reuses, launched with the Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare as chief guest (IIT Delhi official announcement, 10 July 2020). It was not the company’s core business, and it did not become one — but it kept the balance sheet and the engineering bench occupied through a period when the core product’s demand had collapsed.
The turning point
The event that changed Chakr’s trajectory was regulatory, not commercial: in 2017, Chakr Shield became the first device of its kind in India to receive Type Approval Certification from Central Pollution Control Board-approved testing labs — ARAI and ICAT — for reducing pollution from diesel generators, according to accounts in Startuppedia and the PrivateCircle company blog. Before that certification, Chakr was selling a retrofit box to whoever would try it — a mix of telecom towers and FMCG plants running roughly 30 pilot units. A government-recognised certificate changed who could buy it: public-sector and infrastructure buyers that need CPCB-compliant equipment for their own regulatory filings, which is a materially larger and stickier customer base than early adopters testing new hardware. The effect showed up gradually in the capital the company could raise: Chakr closed a ₹19 crore Series A in 2019 led by the Indian Angel Network fund, Jyoti Sagar and IDFC-Parampara Fund (Inc42, reporting on the company’s August 2021 funding round); then added public-sector-linked capital directly, when the ONGC Startup Fund invested ₹2 crore in August 2021, lifting its stake in the company to 8.65% from 5.38% (Inc42, 11 August 2021). A certification earned in a single year is a small line in a company’s history, but it is the line that turned a pilot project into a business regulators and public-sector investors could underwrite.
The money behind it
Chakr’s capital has come in stages, moving from early grants and prizes to a widening mix of venture and public-sector-linked money as the product proved out. Rounds documented across Inc42, Entrackr and Tracxn’s funding data include:
- Pre-seed, December 2015: approximately $220,730 from Globevestor and two other investors (Tracxn funding data).
- Pre-Series A, March 2018: undisclosed amount from IDFC-Parampara Fund (Tracxn funding data).
- Series A, June 2019: ₹19 crore (~$2.75 million) led by Indian Angel Network Fund, with Jyoti Sagar and IDFC-Parampara Fund participating (Inc42, referencing the 2019 round; Tracxn).
- ONGC Startup Fund investment, August 2021: ₹2 crore, taking ONGC’s holding to 8.65% (Inc42, 11 August 2021).
- Series B, November 2021: undisclosed amount led by SBICap Ventures’ Neev Fund II (Entrackr, September 2025 report referencing the prior round).
- Debt facility, 2023–2024: $2.2 million from India Exim Bank (August 2023) and a separate debt investment from British International Investment aimed at alternate battery technology and RECD expansion, which BII exited in March 2025 (Inc42 funding page; BII disclosure, referenced via search of bii.co.uk).
- Series C, announced 22 September 2025: $23 million (₹193.5 crore) led by Iron Pillar, with existing investors SBI Cap Ventures, ONGC, Indian Angel Network and Inflexor Ventures also participating (Entrackr and Evertiq, both 22–24 September 2025).
Iron Pillar’s involvement mattered beyond the cheque size: partner Ashok Ananthakrishnan, who joined Chakr’s board as a nominee director (Tofler director filings), was quoted at the round’s announcement calling Chakr “a rare deep-tech company tackling India’s pollution crisis and energy storage challenges” (Evertiq, 24 September 2025). CEO Kushagra Srivastava framed the round as capital for a broader ambition than emission control alone: “a major step toward realising our vision of building world-class material science technologies from India” (Evertiq, 24 September 2025), tying the raise to the company’s newer aluminium-air battery research rather than only its existing retrofit business.
How it makes money
Chakr’s revenue model has three layers, moving from hardware sale to recurring service:
- Hardware sale and installation — the upfront sale of Chakr Shield, DeNOx, DeSmog or dual-fuel retrofit units to an industrial, commercial or public-sector buyer, priced against the customer’s existing generator capacity (thefoundersmagazine.com summary of Chakr’s business model).
- Maintenance and compliance contracts — ongoing service revenue tied to keeping installed units certified and operational, since a retrofit device needs periodic upkeep to keep meeting CPCB norms (PrivateCircle company profile).
- Monitoring and data services — subscription-style revenue from Chakr GenSense, the IoT layer that tracks generator and emission performance remotely, feeding the compliance-reporting need of large industrial customers.
The part easiest to misread is that this looks like a pure environmental-compliance play, when the underlying economics are closer to an industrial-equipment manufacturer with a recurring-service tail: the retrofit device itself carries the highest margin because it converts what would otherwise be a customer’s environmental liability into a mandatory purchase, while the ink-and-paint byproduct business (marketed under the POINK name in the company’s early years, per The Better India) is a small, largely reputational revenue line rather than a material one. No figure for the byproduct business’s share of revenue is publicly disclosed, so it is not sized here. Costs sit on the other side of the same equation: raw materials and precision manufacturing (Chakr operates plants in Gurugram and Pune, per Entrackr’s September 2025 report) are the largest cost line, and FY25’s numbers — expenses up 51% against revenue up 51.5% — suggest that as of that year, scaling installations had not yet produced the operating leverage that would let profit grow faster than sales (Inc42 Datalabs financial data).
The numbers
Chakr Innovation is privately held, and multi-year financial statements are not fully public; the two most recent fiscal years are documented in Inc42’s Datalabs financial tracker, corroborated in direction (though not to the decimal) by Tofler’s MCA-filing-based summary, which independently shows FY25 revenue growth of 51.46% in a ₹150–200 crore band. Filings for FY22 and FY23 were not found in this session’s research and are not included rather than estimated.
| ₹ crore | FY24 | FY25 |
| Revenue | 124.8 | 189.0 |
| Profit after tax | 9.5 | 3.6 |
| Total expenses | Not disclosed | 183.7 |
| Total assets | Not disclosed | 255.0 |
Read together, FY24 was the year Chakr crossed into profitability for the first time on record (₹9.5 crore profit on ₹124.8 crore revenue), and FY25 is the year growth accelerated sharply while the profit line moved the other way — revenue up 51.5% to ₹189.0 crore, profit after tax down 63% to ₹3.6 crore, and net margin compressing to roughly 1.9% from a considerably higher base the year before (Inc42 Datalabs). None of this is disclosed as a crisis by the company; it reads as a business reinvesting heavily — in manufacturing capacity, in the Pune plant, and in materials-science R&D for the aluminium-air line — ahead of the revenue that investment is meant to eventually produce.
Where the money comes from
Chakr does not publish a segment-wise or geography-wise revenue split, so the following is a picture of where its business is concentrated, not a percentage breakdown:
- Product concentration — Chakr Shield, the original RECD, remains the anchor product referenced across every funding announcement from 2019 to 2025; newer lines (DeNOx, DeSmog, GenSense, dual-fuel kits, aluminium-air batteries) are described by the company as an expanding portfolio rather than as separately reported revenue streams (chakr.in product listing).
- Customer concentration — named customers reported by PrivateCircle include public-sector energy major ONGC, JSW Cement, Hindustan Petroleum and auto-components maker Hitachi Astemo, alongside sector coverage spanning manufacturing, real estate, data centres, hospitality and healthcare (chakr.in; PrivateCircle).
- Geography — installations and manufacturing are concentrated in Delhi NCR and Pune as of the September 2025 funding round, with international expansion named as a specific use of the Series C proceeds rather than an existing revenue base (Entrackr, 22 September 2025).
- The surprise — a company that built its name on cleaning up diesel exhaust is now pitching itself to investors chiefly as a materials-science company: CEO Kushagra Srivastava’s own framing of the Series C round centred on “world-class material science technologies,” and the round’s stated use of funds leads with an indigenous aluminium-air battery to cut dependence on lithium-ion cells, ahead of expanding the emission-control business that still generates the company’s actual revenue (Evertiq, 24 September 2025).
The risks
- Regulatory dependence across geographies. Chakr’s core product’s commercial value comes from certification — CPCB Type Approval in India was the company’s turning point — and any international expansion means repeating that laborious certification process against a different regulator’s standards before the product can be sold there at all (thefoundersmagazine.com summary of company-stated risks).
- Margin compression alongside growth. FY25’s filings already show the mechanism: total expenses grew in line with revenue (both around 51%) while profit after tax fell 63%, so scale has not yet been translating into operating leverage (Inc42 Datalabs financial data).
- Execution risk in a new technology adjacency. The aluminium-air battery line that now anchors Chakr’s growth pitch to investors is a materials-science bet distinct from the mechanical retrofit engineering the company has a decade of experience in; thefoundersmagazine.com’s summary flags “materials science and commercial viability obstacles” in scaling indigenous energy storage as an open risk rather than a solved problem.
- Founder and leadership turnover. Two of the company’s four original co-founders — Bharti Singhla and Prateek Sachan — had left by the time of the Series C round (Tracxn company profile), concentrating institutional knowledge and public-facing leadership in the two remaining co-founders.
The takeaway
Chakr Innovation’s most useful lesson is not about pollution technology at all — it is about how long a genuinely novel piece of hardware can take to become fundable on its own logic. The company spent nearly two years on grants, fellowship money and prize winnings before its first institutional cheque, and the event that changed its trajectory was not a product launch or a marquee investor but a government certification that made its device a recognised category rather than a curiosity. A start-up built on hardware that regulators have to bless before customers can safely buy it should expect its funding curve to track certification milestones more closely than product-launch dates — and should be prepared to survive on non-dilutive money for longer than a typical software business would tolerate, because there is no faster way to skip that step.
Frequently asked questions
What does Chakr Innovation actually sell?
Its main product is Chakr Shield, a retrofit device that clips onto a diesel generator’s exhaust and captures over 80% of particulate matter emissions, which the company then processes into ink and paint; it also sells a NOx-reduction system, a dust-suppression device, IoT generator monitoring, dual-fuel kits, and is developing aluminium-air batteries for energy storage (Entrackr, September 2025; chakr.in).
Who founded Chakr Innovation and when?
It was incorporated on 24 June 2016 by IIT Delhi graduates Kushagra Srivastava, Arpit Dhupar, Bharti Singhla and Prateek Sachan; Singhla and Sachan have since left the company, and Srivastava (CEO) and Dhupar (CTO) continue to lead it (Tofler MCA record; Tracxn company profile).
How much funding has Chakr Innovation raised?
Across seven documented rounds from a December 2015 pre-seed to a September 2025 Series C, Chakr has raised funding from investors including Globevestor, IDFC-Parampara Fund, Indian Angel Network, ONGC Startup Fund, SBICap Ventures’ Neev Fund, India Exim Bank, British International Investment and Iron Pillar; the September 2025 Series C alone was $23 million, or ₹193.5 crore (Entrackr, 22 September 2025; Tracxn funding data).
Is Chakr Innovation profitable?
It turned profitable for the first documented time in FY24, with ₹9.5 crore profit after tax on ₹124.8 crore revenue. In FY25, revenue grew 51.5% to ₹189.0 crore but profit after tax fell 63% to ₹3.6 crore, so profitability narrowed even as the top line grew (Inc42 Datalabs financial data).
What is Chakr Innovation’s valuation?
Entrackr’s report on the September 2025 Series C round stated the valuation was not disclosed by the company. Inc42’s data desk separately estimated it at around $115 million (~₹1,104 crore, converted at $1≈₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026) as of that round — an external estimate, not a company-confirmed figure, so readers should treat it as indicative rather than official.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Entrackr, “Cleantech startup Chakr Innovation raises $23 Mn led by Iron Pillar,” September 2025.
- Evertiq, “Indian cleantech startup Chakr Innovation secures $23M,” September 2025.
- Inc42, “Chakr Innovation Financials 2026 – Revenue, P&L & Cash Flow,” Inc42 Datalabs, accessed September 2026.
- Inc42, “Chakr Innovation – Total Funding, Funding Over Time, Funding By Rounds and More,” Inc42 Datalabs, accessed September 2026.
- Inc42, “ONGC Startup Fund Backs Cleantech Startup Chakr Innovation,” August 2021.
- Tofler, “Chakr Innovation Private Limited” company record (CIN U74999DL2016PTC302071), accessed September 2026.
- Tracxn, “Chakr Innovations — Company Profile, Team, Funding, Competitors & Financials,” accessed September 2026.
- The Better India, “In Pollution-Choked Delhi, a Team of Engineers Is Turning Diesel Soot Into Ink and Paints,” 2016.
- Startuppedia, “This IIT-D founder built India’s first CPCB-approved pollution control device ‘Chakr Shield’,” accessed September 2026.
- PrivateCircle Blog, “Retrofit for the Future: How Chakr Innovation is Cleaning Diesel Generators,” accessed September 2026.
- iamrenew.com, “Bringing the Revolution through Pollution, Chakr Innovations,” accessed September 2026.
- Indiaspora, “Bharti Singhla and Kushagra Srivastava” entrepreneur profile, accessed September 2026.
- IIT Delhi official announcement, “IIT Delhi incubated startup Chakr Innovation launches ‘Chakr DeCoV’,” 10 July 2020.
- chakr.in, company “About Us” and product pages, accessed September 2026.
- The Founders Magazine, “Chakr Innovation Secures $23 Million In Series C: A Turning Point For India’s Deeptech Clean-Tech Sector,” September 2025.
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