The math is uncomfortable: India generates roughly 2.4 million tonnes of used cooking oil each year, and about 60% of it—contaminated, reheated, chemically degraded—finds its way back into the food chain. It's a public health hazard and an environmental waste at once. But for ECOIL, a Delhi-based startup, it's also an opportunity.
On April 7, the company announced it had closed a $2.5 million Series A round led by Fundalogical Ventures, with backing from Caspian Impact Investment, Momentum Capital, and returning investor The Chennai Angels. The funding signals growing confidence in a deceptively complex business: aggregating used cooking oil from thousands of scattered sources—restaurants, hotels, cloud kitchens, food processors—and channeling it into India's nascent biodiesel and sustainable aviation fuel industries.
It's not glamorous work. But it may be essential if India intends to meet its own climate commitments.
The Informal Economy of Grease
ECOIL's pitch rests on solving what insiders call the "last-mile aggregation problem." Used cooking oil collection in India remains largely informal, prone to quality issues, and difficult to trace. The company, founded by husband-and-wife team Sushil Vaishnav and Kirti Vaishnav, has built a technology platform that handles logistics and compliance tracking, feeding data into RUCO—the government's Repurpose Used Cooking Oil program, managed by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India.
Whether the platform can scale fast enough is another question. ECOIL operates under the legal entity KNP Arises Green Energy Private Limited, incorporated on December 6, 2019. According to its LinkedIn profile, the company employs somewhere between 11 and 50 people—a modest headcount for the ambition at hand.
The startup plans to deploy the fresh capital toward expanding operations across India, strengthening its tech infrastructure, and building out logistics capacity. Translation: more trucks, more collection points, more software to keep it all humming.
Regulatory Winds (and Headwinds)
The timing isn't accidental. India has set a target of 5% biodiesel blending by 2030 under its National Policy on Biofuels, though current blend rates linger around 1%, according to USDA estimates from 2024-2025. Meanwhile, sustainable aviation fuel mandates loom on the horizon, creating potential demand for feedstocks like used cooking oil.
In July 2025, FSSAI extended provisional enrollment for 63 not-for-profit units collecting UCO under RUCO—a bureaucratic development, perhaps, but one that signals active regulatory engagement as India's biofuel ambitions depend, in no small part, on formalizing what has historically been an opaque, fragmented supply chain.
"ECOIL is addressing a critical gap in reliable feedstock aggregation at scale," said Anil Saldanha of Fundalogical Ventures, the Mumbai-based firm that led the round. Fundalogical focuses on supply chain, logistics, and sustainability plays—sectors where infrastructure gaps often translate into investable opportunities.
Ankur Shrivastava of Momentum Capital echoed the sentiment, pointing to the startup's emphasis on creating a "traceable and reliable supply chain for UCO." It's a phrase that recurs in investor decks and policy documents alike, though the execution remains stubbornly difficult.
A Crowded, Messy Market
ECOIL isn't alone in chasing this opportunity. The used cooking oil-to-biofuel space has attracted a handful of players—BioD Energy, Buyofuel, BiofuelCircle, Cercle X, and Trieco Green among them—each tackling different parts of the value chain. Some focus on collection, others on aggregation, still others on processing partnerships. The lines blur.
This marks ECOIL's second fundraise. Back in December 2023, the company pulled in approximately $360,000 in angel funding led by The Chennai Angels, with participation from AIC Banasthali Vidyapith Foundation and Shell India through its E4 accelerator program. That early backing bought runway; this Series A is meant to fund real expansion.
Right Pillar Advisors advised on the transaction—a detail worth noting mainly because it suggests the deal was competitive enough to warrant outside advisory support.
The Question Mark
What happens next depends less on ECOIL's execution than on whether India's regulatory framework can keep pace. The government has set ambitious targets, yes. But biodiesel blending rates remain anemic, and SAF mandates are still taking shape. Infrastructure takes time; so does policy implementation.
For now, capital is flowing into feedstock aggregation faster than the end markets are materializing. That's not necessarily a problem—building supply chains ahead of demand is often how markets develop. But it does raise a familiar startup risk: ECOIL and its peers are betting that the policy environment will accelerate, that blending mandates will tighten, that enforcement will improve.
If those bets pay off, used cooking oil could become a cornerstone of India's renewable fuel economy. If they don't, the math gets harder. And somewhere in the background, 60% of the country's used cooking oil continues circulating through kitchens where it probably shouldn't be.
