In FY25, a Pune company that started out selling solar lanterns crossed ₹1,150 crore (about $120 million) in revenue from operations, up roughly 2.5 times in a single year, while its net profit jumped nearly fivefold to about ₹95 crore. That is a rare combination in Indian agri-tech, where scale usually arrives with deepening losses, and it belongs to a firm most urban consumers have never heard of: Ecozen Solutions.
The contradiction sits at the centre of the story. Ecozen sells to farmers, mandis and pump dealers in small-town India, a customer base widely assumed to be too price-sensitive to fund a profitable hardware-and-software business. Yet Ecozen reached first profitability in FY23 and has stayed profitable while growing revenue almost tenfold in three years. This deep dive traces how three IIT Kharagpur engineers built a decentralised cold chain and an irrigation-controls business that the numbers now vouch for.
Quick facts
| Company | Ecozen Solutions Private Limited (CIN U93090PN2010PTC237833) |
| Founded | Incorporated 20 October 2010, Pune, Maharashtra; idea formed at IIT Kharagpur in 2009 |
| Founder(s) | Devendra Gupta (CEO), Prateek Singhal, Vivek Pandey — all IIT Kharagpur alumni |
| Businesses | Ecofrost (solar cold storage), Ecotron (solar pump controllers/irrigation), solar air-conditioning and pumping systems |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹1,150 crore operating revenue in FY25 (~$120 million), up ~2.5x from ₹458 crore in FY24 (RoC filings, reported by Entrackr) |
| Latest FY profit | Net profit ~₹95 crore in FY25, up ~5x from ₹20 crore in FY24 (RoC filings, reported by Entrackr) |
| Listed | Private (unlisted) |
| Last funding / value | $30 million debt-and-equity round in April 2024 led by Nuveen; total raised reported at over $76 million; valuation not publicly disclosed |
| Key shareholders / CEO | CEO Devendra Gupta; investors include Nuveen, Dare Ventures (Coromandel), Omnivore, Caspian; nominee directors from Nuveen and Coromandel on the board |
What they do
Ecozen builds climate-smart hardware, paired with IoT software, for Indian agriculture. Its two flagship lines solve two different post-harvest and pre-harvest problems. Ecofrost is a decentralised, solar-powered cold room that uses thermal energy storage so it can keep running through the night and through grid outages, letting a farmer or aggregator store perishables near the field instead of trucking them to a distant cold store. Ecotron is a smart controller and variable-frequency drive for irrigation pumps that lets solar pumps run more efficiently and be monitored remotely. Around these sit solar pumping systems and solar air-conditioning. The customers are farmers, farmer-producer organisations, mandi traders, dairy and food-processing players, and pump manufacturers who embed Ecotron in their own products.
The origin
The company began not with cold storage but with sunlight. In 2009, three engineering students at IIT Kharagpur — Devendra Gupta, Prateek Singhal and Vivek Pandey — became convinced that solar energy was India’s biggest untapped opportunity, an idea sharpened through college competitions. They incorporated Ecozen in 2010 with a broad goal of delivering energy access efficiently to the masses. Gupta graduated in 2010, Singhal in 2011 and Pandey in 2012, so the early years overlapped with finishing degrees.
The founding insight that eventually defined Ecozen was sharper than “solar is big.” It was that the value of clean energy in rural India is unlocked only when it is welded to a productive-use application the farmer already needs — pumping water, or keeping produce cold — rather than sold as generic power. The team credits fieldwork for the shift. As Gupta has described their time in an incubation and seed programme, they realised how important field and market study were, and spent close to nine months on engineering and market research around micro-cold storage before committing. That discipline of validating in the field before scaling became the company’s operating habit.
The struggle years
Ecozen did not arrive at its winning products. It walked into them after several detours, and the early model looked nothing like today’s business.
- The first pivot (early 2010s): Ecozen initially sold generic solar goods — lanterns, rooftop systems, and residential and LED street lighting. These were low-margin, crowded categories with no defensible edge, and the company moved away from them toward solar-powered agriculture products such as water-pumping solutions.
- The second pivot (into cold storage): Rather than stay a pump-systems vendor, the founders spent roughly nine months on field research before building micro-cold storage, betting that decentralised, off-grid cooling was a harder, more valuable problem. Ecofrost, launched with thermal-storage technology, became the product the company is best known for.
- The long climb to profitability: Even after the products worked, the economics took years. As late as FY22 the company was still marginally loss-making, reporting a net loss of about ₹37 lakh on revenue of ₹122.57 crore, so a decade after incorporation Ecozen had scale but not yet a bottom line.
The pattern across these years was a hardware startup repeatedly rebuilding what it sold — from lighting, to pumps, to cold storage plus controls — while carrying the working-capital burden that physical products in rural markets impose. That it survived long enough to compound is itself part of the story.
The turning point
The inflection was FY23, the year Ecozen turned the corner financially and the flywheel of scale-with-profit began. Revenue rose 139% to ₹293.24 crore in FY23 from ₹122.57 crore in FY22, and the company posted its first full-year net profit of ₹5.76 crore, against the ₹37 lakh loss the year before. Solar products and related items made up about 90% of collections by March 2023.
What makes FY23 the true turning point is what came next: instead of profitability capping growth, growth and profit rose together. From that ₹293 crore base, operating revenue climbed to ₹458 crore in FY24 and then to ₹1,150 crore in FY25, while net profit moved from ₹5.76 crore to ₹20 crore to about ₹95 crore over the same three years. The single event was crossing into the black in FY23; the significance was proving the model could stay there at 3–4x the scale.
The money behind it
Ecozen has funded itself through a blend of equity and, increasingly, debt — appropriate for a hardware business with heavy working-capital needs. The reported milestones:
- Series A (2019): $6 million from Sathguru Catalyser’s Innovation in Food and Agriculture (IFA) fund, alongside early backer Omnivore (Mercom India).
- Series C, first tranche (June 2022): ₹540 million (~$6.93 million) as part of a planned ₹2 billion (~$25.67 million) round, led by Dare Ventures, the venture arm of Coromandel International, with Caspian and Hivos-Triodos Fonds in equity and Northern Arc, UC Inclusive Credit, Maanaveeya and Samunnati in debt (Mercom India).
- Series C close (announced January 2023): $25 million led by Nuveen and Dare Ventures, with participation from India EXIM Bank and existing investors (Nuveen; Business Today).
- Debt-and-equity round (April 2024): $30 million, with equity from Nuveen Global Fund and existing investors and new debt from InCred Credit Fund and the US International Development Finance Corporation (Entrackr).
Total funding to date has been reported at over $76 million by TheKredible; some databases list a higher cumulative figure across more rounds, so treat the exact total as approximate. No post-money valuation has been publicly disclosed. What each backer changed is instructive: Omnivore and the IFA fund gave agri-domain credibility early; Dare Ventures/Coromandel brought a strategic agri-inputs partner; and Nuveen plus development-finance lenders (US DFC, InCred) supplied the larger, patient capital needed to fund inventory and receivables as revenue scaled past ₹1,000 crore.
How it makes money
Ecozen is, at its core, a maker and installer of energy hardware, with software and services layered on top. The money flows and margins break down like this:
- Product sales (the bulk): Selling Ecofrost cold rooms, Ecotron controllers, solar pumps and solar AC. In FY25 the sale of solar and related products was about ₹889 crore, roughly 77% of collections and up about 2.3x year on year.
- Installation and services (the rest): Installing solar pumping systems and related services generated about ₹261 crore in FY25, up about 23%.
- Government-scheme demand: Solar pump adoption in India is heavily linked to subsidy programmes such as PM-KUSUM, which pull volumes but also tie payment cycles to government disbursement.
- Cost base: This is a materials-heavy model. In FY25 material costs were about ₹662.5 crore (up roughly 2x) and contract costs about ₹169 crore (up more than 3x), while employee benefit expense was about ₹49 crore — total expenses were about ₹1,038 crore.
The part people get wrong is assuming a rural hardware business must be low-margin. Ecozen reported an EBITDA margin of 13.17% and a return on capital employed of 28.92% in FY25 — figures that reflect embedding proprietary IoT and thermal-storage technology into commodity solar hardware, which lets it price above a plain panels-and-pumps vendor.
The numbers
Three years of financials show the shape of the turnaround. Figures are operating revenue and net profit/loss in ₹ crore, from filings with the Registrar of Companies as reported by Entrackr and Inc42.
| Fiscal year | Revenue (₹ crore) | Net profit/(loss) (₹ crore) |
| FY22 | 122.57 | (0.37) |
| FY23 | 293.24 | 5.76 |
| FY24 | 458 | 20 |
| FY25 | 1,150 | 95 |
Read together, the table shows revenue rising roughly 9x from FY22 to FY25 while the company swung from a small loss to a ₹95 crore profit. Supporting balance-sheet detail from FY25: cash and bank balances rose to about ₹228 crore from ₹96 crore a year earlier, and total expenses were about ₹1,038 crore against total income of roughly ₹1,150–1,160 crore.
Where the money comes from
The revenue mix has shifted as the business has scaled, and the split reveals where the growth is really coming from:
- Solar and related products — ~77% of FY25 collections (~₹889 crore): the core hardware engine, and the fastest-growing line at about 2.3x year on year.
- Installation of solar pumping systems and other services — ~23% (~₹261 crore): steadier, growing about 23% in FY25.
- Product-mix history: in FY23 solar products and related items were about 90% of collections, so the services share has grown as installation and pumping projects have scaled.
The surprise is directional. A company famous for solar cold storage (Ecofrost) earns the great majority of its money from solar products broadly — with irrigation and pumping, powered by Ecotron controllers, a large driver — rather than from cold rooms alone. Ecotron is reported to hold roughly a 20% share of the Indian solar pump-controller market, and Ecozen says its technology has touched more than 100,000 farmers, deployed 450-plus Ecofrost units and enabled over a billion units of clean energy. Cold storage is the brand’s calling card; solar pumping and controls are a big part of the cash engine.
The risks
- Policy and subsidy dependence: Solar-pump volumes are tied to government schemes such as PM-KUSUM. A change in subsidy design, allocation or payout timing can slow orders and stretch receivables, because much of the demand is scheme-linked rather than purely commercial.
- Working-capital and debt intensity: This is a materials-heavy business — FY25 material costs alone were about ₹662.5 crore — and Ecozen has leaned on debt (InCred, US DFC and other lenders) to fund inventory and receivables. Rising rates, or a mismatch between government payment cycles and supplier payments, would pressure cash flow even while the P&L looks healthy.
- Competition and commoditisation: Solar pumps and panels are increasingly commoditised, with many domestic manufacturers and price competition. Ecozen’s margins rest on the IoT and thermal-storage layer keeping it ahead of plain-hardware rivals; if that differentiation narrows, the 13.17% EBITDA margin is exposed.
The takeaway
Ecozen’s most transferable lesson is not “go green” or “sell to farmers.” It is that in low-price, hardware-heavy markets, the durable margin comes from bolting proprietary software and a hard-to-copy physical capability — here, IoT controls and thermal energy storage — onto an otherwise commoditised product, and then earning the right to scale by proving the unit economics in the field first. Ecozen spent years pivoting from lanterns to pumps to cold storage, stayed close to marginal losses for a decade, and only then compounded revenue nearly tenfold in three years without sacrificing profit. The patience to validate before scaling, and the insistence on a defensible technology layer, are what turned a solar-lighting startup into a profitable ₹1,150-crore climate-tech company.
Frequently asked questions
What does Ecozen Solutions do?
Ecozen builds climate-smart hardware with IoT software for Indian agriculture. Its main products are Ecofrost, a solar-powered decentralised cold storage room with thermal energy storage, and Ecotron, a smart controller for solar irrigation pumps, alongside solar pumping systems and solar air-conditioning.
Who founded Ecozen and when?
Ecozen was founded by IIT Kharagpur alumni Devendra Gupta, Prateek Singhal and Vivek Pandey. The idea took shape at college in 2009 and the company, Ecozen Solutions Private Limited, was incorporated on 20 October 2010 in Pune. Devendra Gupta is the CEO.
Is Ecozen profitable, and how big is it?
Yes. Ecozen turned profitable in FY23 with a net profit of ₹5.76 crore and has grown since. In FY25 it reported operating revenue of about ₹1,150 crore (up roughly 2.5x) and a net profit of about ₹95 crore (up nearly 5x), according to filings reported by Entrackr and Inc42.
How much funding has Ecozen raised?
Ecozen has raised over $76 million to date across equity and debt, per TheKredible, including a $6 million Series A in 2019, a Series C led by Nuveen and Dare Ventures that closed around January 2023, and a $30 million debt-and-equity round in April 2024. No valuation has been publicly disclosed.
Is Ecozen listed on the stock market?
No. Ecozen Solutions is a privately held company and is not listed on any stock exchange as of September 2026. Its investors include Nuveen, Dare Ventures (Coromandel International), Omnivore and Caspian.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Entrackr — “Ecozen’s profit nears Rs 100 Cr in FY25; revenue jumps 2.5X” (January 2026)
- YourStory — “Ecozen’s FY24 profit rises two fold, revenue up 57.2%” (November 2024)
- Entrackr — “Ecozen crosses Rs 120 Cr revenue in FY22, profitability in sight” (June 2023)
- Inc42 — Ecozen Solutions company financials profile (2026)
- Mercom India — “Solar Cold Storage Company Ecozen Secures ₹540 Million Funding” (June 2022)
- Mercom India — “Ecozen Completes $6 Million Series A Funding” (2019)
- Nuveen — “Climate-smart Deeptech Company Ecozen Raises $25 million, Led by Nuveen” (January 2023)
- Business Today — “Climate-focused deeptech start-up Ecozen raises $25 mn from Nuveen, others” (January 2023)
- Entrackr — “Climate-focused deeptech startup Ecozen raises $30 Mn” (April 2024)
- Tofler — Ecozen Solutions Private Limited, corporate registry profile (CIN U93090PN2010PTC237833)
- Ecozen Solutions — corporate website (About Us; press releases)
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