Startup Deep Dive : Varaha — how India’s carbon-removal startup landed Google’s largest biochar deal

In January 2025, Google signed a deal for 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide removal from a company that had, three years earlier, existed only as a hunch about burnt rice stubble in north India. That single contract made Varaha the counterparty in the largest biochar carbon removal transaction recorded to that point, ahead of a prior record of 81,600 tonnes.

The company selling those credits is not an energy major or a Silicon Valley climate lab. It is a Gurugram and Bengaluru-based startup that pays smallholder farmers with under 10 hectares of land to stop burning their crop waste, and turns that waste into biochar and bio-fertiliser instead. It has never sold a single carbon credit to an Indian buyer.

Quick facts

What they do

Varaha builds and runs carbon-removal projects across smallholder farmland in South Asia and West Africa, then sells the resulting carbon credits to corporate buyers abroad. It works with farmers on practices such as avoiding paddy-straw burning, switching to direct-seeded rice, converting crop residue into biochar, and spreading crushed rock for enhanced weathering, then uses its own measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) software — built on remote sensing, machine learning and field science — to quantify how much carbon dioxide each practice keeps out of the atmosphere. As of February 2026 it runs 14 active projects across India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Ivory Coast, covering roughly 1.7 million acres and engaging 170,000-plus farmers, according to TechCrunch’s reporting on the company’s most recent funding round.

The origin

Madhur Jain spent years working the problem before he had a product to sell. An agricultural engineer with an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, he had already run supply-chain projects for Godrej Agrovet in rural India before becoming the first India country director for Precision Development (PxD), the farmer-advisory nonprofit co-founded by Nobel laureate economist Michael Kremer. There, according to his own account reported by TechCrunch, he grew PxD’s smallholder user base from 5,000 to more than 700,000 farmers across sixty-plus districts and watched the same practice play out every winter: farmers setting fire to leftover rice stubble because it was the cheapest way to clear a field for the next crop.

He wanted to pay farmers not to burn. The problem was that no financial instrument existed to do it. Carbon credit methodologies for agricultural soil practices simply had not been built yet, even in developed carbon markets. Jain has said he waited for those methodologies to mature elsewhere before co-founding Varaha with Ankita Garg and Vishal Kuchanur in February 2022 — naming the company after the Sanskrit word for the boar, a mythological guardian said to have lifted the earth out of a cosmic flood.

The struggle years

The gap between having the idea and being able to sell anything was long and expensive. Even after founding the company, Varaha had to put a new regenerative-agriculture methodology through a seven-and-a-half-month audit with Verra, the largest voluntary carbon registry, before it could issue its first verified credits — a stretch in which the company was spending seed capital with no credit revenue coming in, as TechCrunch reported in February 2024.

That audit was also running headlong into a credibility crisis that nearly poisoned the entire category Varaha was trying to build in. In January 2023, an investigation by The Guardian, Die Zeit and SourceMaterial found that roughly 94% of the rainforest carbon credits certified by Verra did not represent genuine emissions reductions, with deforestation threats overstated by an average of 400%. The fallout was severe enough that Verra’s chief executive, David Antonioli, resigned that May. Varaha was not implicated in the investigation and works in a different credit category — agricultural soil carbon and biochar rather than rainforest avoidance — but it was trying to sell a brand-new, unproven type of carbon credit into a market whose flagship registry had just been shown, publicly and in detail, to have let through credits that did not do what they claimed.

Underneath both problems sat a structural one that has not gone away: Varaha runs its projects entirely in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Ivory Coast, but as of its February 2024 funding round it had no Indian buyers for its credits at all. Jain told TechCrunch that consumer pressure was pushing companies in Europe and the United States to buy voluntary offsets, while India had no comparable domestic economic incentive — meaning every rupee of revenue had to be earned by convincing a foreign corporate buyer to trust a small Indian startup’s carbon math.

The turning point

The moment that changed Varaha’s trajectory was Google’s biochar purchase, announced on 16 January 2025: an agreement for 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide removal credits to be delivered by 2030, split alongside a parallel deal with US company Charm Industrial. It was Google’s first carbon-removal deal tied to an Indian project, and TechCrunch reported it as the largest biochar transaction on record at the time, ahead of an earlier 81,600-tonne deal between Senken and Exomad Green.

The scale of the shift shows up in what came immediately before and after. Going into that deal, Varaha had raised a combined $12.7 million in equity across its 2022 seed and 2024 Series A rounds, and had processed at least 40,000 tonnes of biomass to produce roughly 10,000 tonnes of biochar in the prior year, per TechCrunch’s reporting on the Google agreement. In the twelve months that followed, Mirova committed $30 million in project financing to Varaha’s regenerative-agriculture work in Haryana and Punjab (announced November 2025, its largest carbon-removal commitment to date, per TechCrunch and Business Standard); Microsoft signed a separate agreement for over 100,000 tonnes of removal; and WestBridge Capital led a $45 million Series B, with a first $20 million tranche closing in February 2026 — WestBridge’s first climate-tech investment, according to entrackr and ESG Dive. Registrar of Companies filings show Varaha’s revenue rising from under ₹1 crore in FY23 to ₹51.74 crore in FY25, a period that brackets the Google deal almost exactly.

The money behind it

• Seed — $4 million, announced December 2022: led by Orios Venture Partners, with Omnivore, RTP Global, Better Capital and angel investors including CRED founder Kunal Shah (Inc42).
• Series A — $8.7 million, announced 21 February 2024: led by RTP Global, with returning investors Omnivore and Orios, plus new backers Norinchukin Bank (Japan’s largest agricultural cooperative bank), AgFunder and IMC Pan Asia Alliance Group’s Octave Wellbeing Economy Fund (AgFunder News, YourStory, Carbon Herald).
• Mirova project financing — $30 million, announced 12-13 November 2025: not an equity round; Paris-based Mirova is funding Varaha’s “Kheti” soil-carbon project across 675,000 hectares in Haryana and Punjab in exchange for a share of future carbon credits, its largest single carbon-removal commitment to date (TechCrunch, Business Standard, Mirova).
• Series B (first tranche) — $20 million, announced 4 February 2026: led by WestBridge Capital, with RTP Global and Omnivore continuing; the tranche is part of a targeted $45 million round (entrackr, ESG Dive, ESG Today).
• Total equity raised to date (as of February 2026): approximately $33 million, plus roughly $35 million in project financing and $500,000 in grants, per ESG Dive’s reporting on the Series B.

What each backer changed: Orios and Omnivore’s seed money let Varaha build its first MRV pipeline and get through the Verra audit; RTP Global’s Series A funded expansion into Nepal, Bangladesh and Kenya; Mirova’s project financing effectively pre-funded a 337,000-farmer regenerative-agriculture project without diluting the cap table; and WestBridge’s Series B is earmarked for scaling the company’s new Varaha Industrial Partners Program, which lets industrial biomass and gasification operators — including a West African cashew processor and an Indian steel producer — plug into Varaha’s MRV and credit-issuance stack (ESG Dive, entrackr).

How it makes money

Varaha does not sell fertiliser or farm inputs for cash. It sells verified carbon credits, generated through a mix of pathways, to corporate buyers who need to offset or remove emissions.

• Regenerative agriculture and agroforestry: farmers adopt direct-seeded rice, reduced water use and residue retention; Varaha’s MRV platform quantifies the emissions avoided and the carbon sequestered in soil.
• Biochar: Varaha buys agricultural biomass waste from farmers, pyrolyses it into biochar, returns the biochar to farmers as bio-fertiliser, and sells the associated carbon credits — each tonne of biochar is said to generate roughly 2.5 carbon credits, with a claimed storage permanence of around 1,600 years (TechCrunch, on the Google deal).
• Enhanced rock weathering (ERW): crushed silicate rock is spread on farmland to accelerate natural CO2 absorption; Varaha issued Asia’s first registry-backed ERW credits in October 2025, via Puro.earth (Carbon Herald).

Revenue split, as reported by TechCrunch in February 2024: farmers receive 60-65% of what a carbon credit sells for, Varaha keeps 20-25%, and its on-ground implementation partners take the remaining 10-15%. The part people tend to get wrong is assuming Varaha is a fintech-style intermediary skimming a fee on farm produce; it is closer to a project developer and MRV vendor whose real product is a verified, registry-issued tonne of carbon dioxide, sold under multi-year offtake contracts to buyers such as Google, Microsoft, Lufthansa, Swiss Re and Capgemini (per ESG Dive’s November 2025 interview with CEO Madhur Jain). Its credits are issued through international registries including Verra, Puro.earth, Gold Standard, Isometric and Carbon Standards International, and the company reports it became, in October 2025, the first company in Asia and third globally to have issued credits from two distinct removal pathways (biochar and ERW) — a claim made by the company and reported by Carbon Herald and ESG Dive, not independently audited by a third party in the sources checked here.

The numbers

Varaha ClimateAg Private Limited’s Registrar of Companies filings, as summarised by corporate-data platforms Tofler and TheCompanyCheck, show:

• Two data platforms give different YoY growth rates for FY25 off the same base (672.4% per Tracxn versus 791.7% per TheCompanyCheck) — both are reported here since the underlying RoC filing was not accessible directly.
• FY24 revenue and any year-by-year profit/loss figures were not available in the public filing summaries checked this session, so that gap has been left open rather than estimated.
• A November 2025 CEO interview (ESG Dive) discussed Varaha’s growth qualitatively but did not state specific revenue or profit figures on a second, more careful read — so no CEO-quoted revenue number is used here.

Where the money comes from

• Geography of operations: India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Ivory Coast, with Vietnam and Indonesia named as expansion targets (TechCrunch, February 2026).
• Geography of buyers: almost entirely Europe and North America — Google, Microsoft, Lufthansa, Swiss Re, Capgemini and Mirova are the named offtake counterparties (ESG Dive, TechCrunch); Varaha reported zero Indian buyers as of February 2024.
• Pathway mix: regenerative agriculture and agroforestry credits (the largest acreage base); biochar (the fastest-growing and highest-profile line, on the back of the Google and Microsoft deals); enhanced rock weathering (newest, launched October 2025).
• The surprise: a company built entirely on Indian and South Asian farmland earns essentially none of its revenue from India, because the country’s voluntary corporate demand for carbon credits remains thin next to Europe and the US (Jain, quoted in TechCrunch, February 2024).

The risks

• Additionality scrutiny on nature-based and biochar credits: critics including the watchdog Biofuelwatch argue that some biochar and soil-carbon projects fail the “additionality” test — the requirement that a credit fund carbon removal that would not have happened anyway — and the ICVCM tightened its additionality and permanence rules for biochar methodologies in 2025, making production audits a bigger part of every issuance.
• Voluntary carbon market price volatility and oversupply: the average price of voluntary carbon credits fell around 20% in 2025 even as the market’s total value held roughly flat, and low-rated credits remain heavily oversupplied industry-wide (Carbon Pulse); Varaha’s high-integrity positioning helps it command premium pricing versus that low-quality glut, but it still sells into a market where the median project has struggled on both price and trust.
• Buyer concentration and geographic mismatch: Varaha’s disclosed offtake relationships are dominated by a small number of large corporates (Google, Microsoft, Mirova, Lufthansa, Swiss Re, Capgemini), all outside the country where every project physically operates — a structure that ties revenue to a handful of counterparties’ voluntary climate budgets rather than a broad domestic market.

The takeaway

Varaha’s path suggests that in carbon markets, the hardest part is rarely the science — it is the multi-year wait for a registry, a methodology and a buyer’s trust to all exist at the same time. Madhur Jain saw the crop-burning problem while still working for someone else, in the 2010s; he could only turn it into a company once agricultural carbon methodologies matured abroad, and only turn that company into a real business once a seven-and-a-half-month Verra audit closed and a market shaken by the 2023 Guardian-Verra scandal was ready to trust a new category of credit again. The lesson for anyone building a business on top of an emerging standard or regulation is the same: the idea can be right for years before the infrastructure around it is ready to pay for it, and survival depends on funding that gap without pretending it isn’t there.

Frequently asked questions

What does Varaha actually sell?

Verified carbon credits generated from regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, biochar and enhanced rock weathering projects run with smallholder farmers across South Asia and West Africa, sold under multi-year offtake contracts to corporate buyers such as Google and Microsoft.

Who founded Varaha and when?

Madhur Jain, Ankita Garg and Vishal Kuchanur founded the company on 7 February 2022, after Jain spent years working with smallholder farmers at Godrej Agrovet and Precision Development (PxD).

How much has Varaha raised, and from whom?

Roughly $33 million in equity as of February 2026, across a $4 million seed round (2022, led by Orios Venture Partners), an $8.7 million Series A (February 2024, led by RTP Global), and a $20 million first tranche of a targeted $45 million Series B (February 2026, led by WestBridge Capital) — plus about $35 million in separate project financing, including Mirova’s $30 million commitment in November 2025.

Is Varaha profitable?

Registrar of Companies filing data summarised by Tofler shows a positive net margin for FY25 (year ended 31 March 2025), consistent with the company’s own statement that it is profitable after tax; independent, itemised profit-and-loss figures were not available in the public filing summaries checked for this piece.

Why does an India-focused company have almost no Indian customers?

Because voluntary corporate demand for carbon credits has historically been far stronger in Europe and North America than in India, so Varaha’s revenue depends on convincing foreign buyers to trust carbon accounting done on Indian, Nepali, Bangladeshi and Ivorian farms, rather than on any domestic Indian market for offsets.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• TechCrunch, “India’s Varaha bags $20M to scale carbon removal from the Global South,” February 2026
• TechCrunch, “Google strikes world’s largest biochar carbon removal deal with Indian startup Varaha,” January 2025
• TechCrunch, “Varaha helps Indian farmers reduce climate-harming practices like burning crop residue and flooding rice fields,” February 2024
• TechCrunch, “Kering-backed fund Mirova pours $30.5M into India’s Varaha for regenerative farming push,” November 2025
• ESG Dive, “Varaha CEO talks carbon removal projects, climate tech and sustainable agriculture,” November 2025
• ESG Dive, “CDR company Varaha nabs $20M investment, launches biochar partnership,” February 2026
• ESG Dive, “Carbon project developer Varaha nabs $30M from Mirova to scale regenerative agriculture,” November 2025
• ESG Today, “Carbon Removal Project Developer Varaha Raises $20 Million,” February 2026
• ESG Today, “Mirova Invests $30 Million in India-based Sustainable Farming Carbon Project,” November 2025
• Business Standard, “Mirova invests $30 mn in Varaha’s Kheti soil carbon project in India,” November 2025
• Mirova, “Mirova invests USD30 million in Varaha’s regenerative agriculture project in India,” November 2025
• Entrackr, “Climate-tech startup Varaha raises $20 Mn in Series B led by WestBridge Capital,” February 2026
• YourStory, “Climate-tech startup Varaha raises $8.7M from RTP Global,” February 2024
• AgFunder News, “Varaha raises $8.7m to help smallholders in Asia & Africa transition to climate-friendly farming methods,” February 2024
• Carbon Herald, “Varaha Raises $8.7M In Series A To Boost Sustainable Agriculture In Asia And Africa,” February 2024
• Carbon Herald, “Varaha Issues The First Registry-Backed ERW Carbon Credits In Asia,” October 2025
• Inc42, “Cleantech Startup Varaha Raises Funding To Expand Across South Asia,” December 2022
• Tofler, Varaha ClimateAg Private Limited company and financial filing summary (CIN U72900HR2022PTC124578), accessed September 2026
• TheCompanyCheck, Varaha Climateag Private Limited FY2025 financial profile, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, Varaha company and funding profile, accessed September 2026
• Carbon Herald, “The Guardian Investigation Of Verra Carbon Offsets Claims More Than 90% Are ‘Worthless’,” coverage of the January 2023 Guardian/Die Zeit/SourceMaterial investigation
• Carbon Pulse, “Average price of voluntary carbon credits fell 20% in 2025, analysis shows,” 2026
• The Icons, “Madhur Jain, CEO of Varaha: Planting Seeds of Change by Paying Farmers to Heal the Earth,” June 2025

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