In the year to March 2024, a Bengaluru company that turns kitchen waste and crop stubble into vehicle-grade gas grew its revenue nearly three-fold to ₹465.58 crore (about $48 million) and still finished the year with a ₹43.59 crore net profit, according to audited figures reported by CARE Ratings. That combination — heavy infrastructure, breakneck growth and a profit at the bottom — is rare in India’s climate-tech field, where most peers are still burning venture money.
The company is GPS Renewables Private Limited. It spent its first seven or eight years as a small vendor selling on-site biogas units to hotels and campuses, then pivoted into building industrial compressed-biogas plants for the country’s oil giants. This is the story of how a waste-management idea from two IIM Bangalore graduates became a business with an order book of more than ₹1,200 crore and joint ventures with Indian Oil and Bharat Petroleum.
Quick facts
| Company | GPS Renewables Private Limited (CIN U74900KA2012PTC064932) |
| Founded | 2012, Bengaluru, Karnataka |
| Founder(s) | Mainak Chakraborty and Sreekrishna Sankar (IIM Bangalore alumni) |
| Businesses | Compressed biogas (CBG / BioCNG) plants — engineering (EPC) and co-development; captive biogas units (BioUrja); GreenCNG brand |
| Latest FY revenue | FY24 total operating income ₹465.58 crore (audited); FY25 more than ₹900 crore (CARE Ratings) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | FY24 net profit ₹43.59 crore (audited) |
| Listed | Private (unlisted) |
| Last valuation / round | Series C of ₹635 crore announced June 2026; ₹125 crore primary equity led by PixelSky Capital. Post-money valuation not publicly disclosed. |
| Key backers / CEO | CEO and co-founder Mainak Chakraborty; backers include Neev Fund II (SBICAP Ventures), Hivos-Triodos, Caspian and PixelSky Capital |
What GPS Renewables does
GPS Renewables builds plants that convert organic waste — food waste, municipal wet waste, paddy straw and other crop residue — into compressed biogas (CBG), a purified methane fuel that can replace CNG in vehicles and piped natural gas in industry. The company sells this in two ways: as an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor that designs and builds plants for others, and, increasingly, as a co-developer that puts in equity and owns a stake in the plant it builds.
- Core customers: oil marketing companies (Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum), waste-to-energy developers and large corporates.
- Named clients (per CARE Ratings, April 2025): Reliance Industries, Reliance Bio Energy, EverEnviro, Microsoft, Bosch, Intel, Infosys and Accor Hotels.
- Legacy product: BioUrja, a captive on-site biogas unit for hotels and campuses, with more than 100 installations reported across South Asia (company-stated).
- Core technology: “Thermophilic Anaerobic Digestion” to convert feedstock such as paddy straw into CBG, with granted patents for moisture removal from raw biogas and use of anaerobic fungi to pre-treat lignocellulosic biomass (CARE Ratings, April 2025).
The origin
GPS Renewables was set up in 2012 by Mainak Chakraborty and Sreekrishna Sankar, both graduates of the two-year MBA at IIM Bangalore. Chakraborty skipped campus placement because he wanted to build a for-profit venture that faced the environment; he was not sure what the product would be. The two settled on a problem that was, as Chakraborty told Forbes India, staring their IT city in the face: waste. Bengaluru generated mountains of wet organic waste, and there was no clean way to deal with it.
Their insight was that the village-style gobar (dung) gas plant could be re-engineered for a city. They made the digester smaller, odour-free and vertically stackable so it could sit inside a hotel or a corporate campus and turn that building’s food waste into cooking gas on site. The product was branded BioUrja. Their first commercial pilot came through the non-profit Akshaya Patra, after which they moved into corporate canteens and luxury hotels. Early recognition followed: Chakraborty and Sankar were named to MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 (2014), placed in the global top five at the Tech Museum awards (2015), and BioUrja was listed by Sustainia among sustainable energy innovations (2016).
The struggle years
The recognition did not come with easy money. By Chakraborty’s own account to Forbes India, GPS Renewables “survived on seed money, research and development grants, debt and non-collateral loans” for seven to eight years before it raised any institutional equity. A decentralised, sell-one-unit-at-a-time model is slow: each hotel or campus is a bespoke sale, the tickets are small, and scaling means multiplying sales effort rather than multiplying revenue.
Two structural problems dogged the early business. The first was the ceiling on captive biogas: a single building only produces so much waste, so each BioUrja unit was small and the addressable revenue per customer was capped. The second was cash. Even after the company scaled up into industrial projects, its money kept arriving late: CARE Ratings notes that a large share of revenue is booked right at the financial year-end and that the gross working-capital cycle ran to 152 days in FY24 (166 days in FY23), leaving the balance sheet stretched, with overall gearing at 9.91x as on 31 March 2023 before it eased to 6.17x a year later. This is a business that had to learn to survive long gaps between doing the work and getting paid.
The turning point
The decisive move was abandoning the small-unit model for industrial scale. GPS Renewables engineered and commissioned what has been described as Asia’s largest BioCNG plant built on source-separated organic waste, in Indore, Madhya Pradesh — a facility spread over about 15 acres that processes roughly 550 tonnes of city waste a day into around 17 tonnes of compressed biogas, built in a reported nine months and inaugurated by the Prime Minister in February 2022. The gas was intended to run some 400 city buses.
The numbers on either side of the pivot are stark. In FY23 the company’s total operating income was ₹152.27 crore; a year later, in FY24, it was ₹465.58 crore — growth of about 205.8% in a single year (audited figures via CARE Ratings). Profit after tax moved from ₹10.96 crore in FY23 to ₹43.59 crore in FY24. The Indore project turned GPS Renewables from a product vendor into an infrastructure contractor the government’s oil companies wanted to partner, and the order book followed.
The money behind it
GPS Renewables stayed bootstrapped far longer than most, then raised in steps as the projects got bigger. The rounds, in order:
- Series A (late 2020): about $3 million from the Netherlands-based Hivos-Triodos Fund and Caspian Impact Investments — its first institutional equity.
- Series B (2022): about $20 million (some reports say $17 million) led by Neev Fund II, managed by SBICAP Ventures, with Hivos-Triodos and Caspian participating.
- Debt (April 2024): $50 million from a syndicate of banks and NBFCs reported to include PNB, HDFC Bank, YES Bank, HSBC, ICICI Bank, Citibank, Vivriti Capital and Northern Arc, earmarked for building CBG plants nationwide.
- Series C (June 2026): ₹635 crore in total. This comprised ₹125 crore of primary equity led by PixelSky Capital with the Spectrum Impact family office, plus asset-platform tie-ups: ₹200 crore into the GPSR Arya holding company from a Korean conglomerate and an earlier ₹310 crore commitment from Japan’s Sojitz Corporation for the Indian Oil project platform. DealStreetAsia pegged the round at $66.3 million.
- Total raised to date is reported at about $91.7 million across seven rounds from 22 investors (Tracxn, 2026) — treat as reported, not audited.
- What each backer changed: Hivos-Triodos and Caspian provided the first patient impact capital; Neev Fund II gave it the balance sheet to attempt Indore-scale plants; PixelSky Capital and the asset-platform partners are funding the shift from building plants to owning them.
- The company has not disclosed a post-money valuation for the Series C; any single valuation figure in circulation is unconfirmed.
How it makes money
The economics changed with the strategy. Historically GPS Renewables earned an EPC margin — it charged to design and build a plant and booked that as project revenue. It is now moving to a co-development model where it invests equity alongside oil marketing companies and shares in the plant’s operating cash flows over its life. Where the money sits:
- EPC fees: project revenue from designing and constructing plants; margins vary with the scope of each contract. Operating margin was around 5% in H1FY25 (CARE Ratings), pressured by senior hiring ahead of large orders.
- Co-development stakes: equity in the plants themselves, held through subsidiary GPS Arya Private Limited (GAPL), earning a share of long-term CBG sales.
- Feedstock-to-fuel spread: the underlying plant economics turn cheap or free organic waste into CBG sold to oil companies under offtake arrangements; patented processes lift CBG yield per tonne of feedstock.
- The part people get wrong: this is capital-intensive infrastructure, not asset-light software. Co-development requires GPS Renewables to commit roughly ₹500 crore of equity over the next couple of years (CARE Ratings), of which about ₹150 crore had been invested in GAPL — ₹50 crore from internal accruals and ₹100 crore raised as non-convertible debentures.
The numbers
Audited figures reported by CARE Ratings (April 2025), in ₹ crore unless stated. FY25 is the rating agency’s stated figure; the company later described FY25 revenue as roughly ₹1,000 crore in its June 2026 funding announcement.
| Metric (₹ crore) | FY23 (audited) | FY24 (audited) | H1FY25 (unaudited) | FY25 (est.) |
| Total operating income | 152.27 | 465.58 | 322.58 | >900 |
| PBILDT (operating profit) | 15.99 | 62.47 | 14.48 | n/a |
| Profit after tax | 10.96 | 43.59 | 4.75 | n/a |
| Overall gearing (times) | 9.91 | 6.17 | 8.35 | n/a |
| Interest coverage (times) | 7.84 | 6.98 | 1.44 | n/a |
- Independent database Inc42 reports FY24 revenue at ₹473.4 crore and PAT at ₹43.6 crore on a total-income basis — close to, and consistent with, the audited operating-income figure above.
- Inc42 also cites FY22 operating profit of about ₹17.5 crore and PAT of about ₹11 crore, indicating GPS Renewables has been profitable through the growth phase.
- Order book stood at more than ₹1,200 crore as on 31 March 2025 (CARE Ratings), giving near-term revenue visibility.
Where the money comes from
The revenue mix has shifted from many small captive units to a handful of very large projects tied to the oil companies. The concentration and the partnerships:
- Oil marketing companies are now the demand engine. A government mandate requires OMCs to source 1% of their gas needs from CBG (CARE Ratings), and that obligation is what pulls the order book.
- Indian Oil JV — IGRPL (June 2024): IOC GPS Renewables Private Limited, a joint venture (reported 50:50) to co-develop CBG plants. Nine co-development orders were awarded in FY25 with about 20 more in the pipeline (CARE Ratings); the JV raised roughly $95 million in debt from Indian Bank.
- Bharat Petroleum JV (signed 13 September 2024): a joint venture to set up an estimated 8–10 CBG plants across Bihar, Odisha, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.
- Customer diversification: CARE notes the order book, once concentrated in a single customer, has broadened across multiple OMCs — a deliberate de-risking.
- The surprise: revenue is heavily back-ended to the year-end because payments are milestone-based, so a strong full-year number can hide lumpy quarters — H1FY25 operating margin was only around 5%.
The risks
Most of these are risks GPS Renewables and its rating agency disclose openly.
- Execution and performance risk on co-development: by owning stakes in plants rather than only building them, GPS Renewables is now exposed to liabilities if a plant fails to hit agreed operating parameters. CARE flags the “limited operating track record” of operational CBG plants as a real hazard that could trigger claims.
- Capital intensity: the co-development shift requires about ₹500 crore of equity over the next couple of years. If the planned equity raises slip, the company’s cash flow comes under stress — CARE’s negative rating trigger was an inability to raise capital by Q1FY26.
- Dependence on OMC timelines: FY25 came in “weaker-than-anticipated” because JV formation and work orders were delayed by approvals and partner due diligence (CARE Ratings). The demand is policy-driven, so the pace is not fully in the company’s hands.
- Stretched working capital and leverage: a 152-day working-capital cycle and gearing of 6.17x as on 31 March 2024 mean the business runs on borrowed money between milestones; interest coverage, while adequate at 6.98x in FY24, thinned to 1.44x in H1FY25.
- External shocks: a construction ban in Delhi to fight air pollution cost the company several months of revenue in FY25 (CARE Ratings) — a reminder that plant-building is exposed to local regulatory stoppages.
The takeaway
The transferable lesson from GPS Renewables is about patience with a business model, not just with a market. For seven or eight years the founders ran a technically clever product that could not scale, funded by grants and loans. Growth did not come from doing more of the same; it came from changing what they sold — from a captive box in a hotel basement to an industrial plant an oil company would sign a joint venture over. The recognition arrived early, in 2014; the revenue arrived nearly a decade later, once the product was re-shaped to match how the money in energy actually moves. When a good technology stalls, the fix is often the business model around it, not the technology itself.
Frequently asked questions
What does GPS Renewables do?
It designs, builds and increasingly co-owns plants that convert organic waste — food waste, municipal wet waste and crop residue such as paddy straw — into compressed biogas (CBG), a methane fuel that substitutes for CNG and piped natural gas. It works largely with India’s oil marketing companies.
Who founded GPS Renewables and when?
It was founded in 2012 in Bengaluru by Mainak Chakraborty and Sreekrishna Sankar, both IIM Bangalore MBA graduates. Chakraborty is the CEO.
Is GPS Renewables profitable?
Yes, on the latest available audited figures. CARE Ratings reported a net profit of ₹43.59 crore in FY24 on total operating income of ₹465.58 crore, and the company was profitable in FY23 as well.
How much has GPS Renewables raised?
It announced a ₹635 crore Series C in June 2026 (₹125 crore of it primary equity led by PixelSky Capital, the rest asset-platform tie-ups). Earlier rounds include about $20 million in Series B (2022) and roughly $3 million in Series A (2020). Total funding is reported at about $91.7 million.
Is GPS Renewables listed on the stock exchange?
No. As of September 2026 it is a privately held company, backed by financial and strategic investors and partnered with Indian Oil and Bharat Petroleum through joint ventures.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- CARE Ratings, press release on GPS Renewables Private Limited (April 2025) — audited FY23/FY24 financials, H1FY25, order book, rating, risks.
- Inc42, GPS Renewables company financials (2026) — FY22–FY24 revenue and profit database figures.
- PR Newswire India / The Wire, “GPS Renewables raises ₹635 crore in Series C funding” (June 2026) — Series C structure, revenue and headcount.
- DealStreetAsia, “India’s GPS Renewables raises $66.3m in Series C round” (June 2026).
- Forbes India, “GPS Renewables: Converting waste to bioenergy, the tech way” — founding story and early struggle.
- Renewable Watch / Mercom India / Inc42, GPS Renewables $50 million debt financing (April 2024).
- Business Standard / IndianOil press release, IOC–GPS Renewables joint venture IGRPL (June 2024); Entrepreneur India, IGRPL debt from Indian Bank.
- Bharat Petroleum / Autocar Professional, BPCL–GPS Renewables JV agreement (September 2024).
- Tracxn, GPS Renewables funding and investors profile (2026) — total raised and investor count (reported).
- IIM Bangalore alumni news; MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 (2014).
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