The carbon removal market has no shortage of ambitious promises. What it lacks, investors will tell you after a few drinks, is companies that can actually deliver credits at scale while turning a profit.
Varaha, a Gurugram-based startup working with smallholder farmers across South and Southeast Asia, is making a case it might be one of the exceptions. The company has closed a $20 million first tranche of what will be a $45 million Series B round, led by WestBridge Capital—the growth-stage investor's inaugural climate-tech bet after years of backing consumer internet and SaaS companies across India and the United States.
The second tranche, roughly $25 million more, should come together within months, according to people familiar with the deal. RTP Global and Omnivore, both existing backers, joined the round. RTP took what insiders describe as a "super pro-rata" position, doubling down after leading Varaha's $8.7 million Series A just a year ago, in February 2024. When the full round closes, WestBridge will own about 20 percent of the company.
The Rare Thing: Revenue and Margin
Founded in 2022, Varaha operates in a space that tends to attract more skepticism than capital these days. It sits at the messy intersection of agricultural development and voluntary carbon markets, deploying digital monitoring systems to track carbon sequestration projects spread across India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Côte d'Ivoire. The company works with some 175,000 farmers managing 1.7 million acres, generating credits through biochar production, enhanced rock weathering, afforestation, and various regenerative agriculture practices.
What caught WestBridge's attention? The financials, apparently. Varaha reported revenue of approximately ₹430 million (about $4.8 million) last fiscal year from delivered credits. This year, the company is guiding toward ₹1 billion—roughly $11 million—and claims it's already profitable on an after-tax basis. That's unusual enough in climate tech to merit a second look.
"They have $100 million in contracted pipeline over the next two to three years," said Sandeep Singhal, managing director at WestBridge, in an interview. He framed it as validation that the model works, that unit economics aren't just a distant promise. Whether that contracted revenue materializes on schedule is another question—carbon credit deliveries have a way of slipping—but the commitments themselves came from buyers with deep pockets.
Anchor Customers: Google, Then Microsoft
In January 2025, Google committed to purchasing 100,000 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent biochar credits from Varaha's Gujarat project, with deliveries stretching through 2030. At the time, it was described as the world's largest biochar carbon removal deal. A year later, Microsoft followed with its own agreement: more than 100,000 tonnes over three years, tied to an ambitious plan to deploy 18 industrial gasification reactors across India's cotton belt, each backed by 15-year operational commitments.
Varaha has also signed up Lufthansa, Swiss Re, and Capgemini as buyers, though the company hasn't disclosed volumes for those relationships. Perhaps they're smaller, or perhaps Varaha is simply being selective about what it announces. Either way, securing two of the tech industry's most aggressive carbon buyers—both under intense scrutiny to demonstrate real climate progress—gives Varaha a credibility that most early-stage removal companies can't claim.
MRV as Moat (Maybe)
The new capital will fund geographic expansion—Vietnam and Indonesia are next on the list—and further development of Varaha's monitoring, reporting, and verification stack. That's the MRV layer, for those tracking industry jargon. Varaha's system combines satellite remote sensing, machine learning models, geo-tagged field validation, and on-ground sensor arrays to track carbon sequestration in real time.
The company issues credits through multiple registries: Puro.earth, Isometric, Verra, Gold Standard, and Carbon Standards International. It claims India's first registry-backed industrial biochar issuance and, as of October 2025, Asia's first enhanced rock weathering credit, issued via Puro.earth.
A newer initiative, the Varaha Industrial Partners Program—call it VIPP, because acronyms remain unavoidable—aims to accelerate biochar production by partnering with operators who already control sustainable biomass feedstock and gasification infrastructure. Varaha supplies the MRV technology, installs sensors, trains staff, and handles credit origination and sales. The early pipeline includes a West African cashew processor, several Indian agribusinesses, and a major Indian steel company, according to the company.
Execution Over Innovation
Madhur Jain, Varaha's CEO, has framed the company's strategy around execution from lower-cost geographies rather than proprietary breakthroughs. "Technology will likely become open over time," he told TechCrunch in a recent interview. "The question is who can execute with integrity and build the partnerships to do it."
It's a pragmatic, almost deliberately unflashy pitch. Varaha employs about 230 people, more than 80 percent of them based in India. Last year, the company processed around 240,000 tons of biomass to produce 55,000 to 56,000 tons of biochar, translating to roughly 115,000 credits issued. Varaha is targeting roughly double that throughput in 2026—a significant ramp, but one that hinges on feedstock supply chains, reactor uptime, and farmer coordination all going smoothly.
Singhal, the WestBridge investor, described Varaha as "uniquely positioned to build a global carbon-removal platform from India" with "deep scientific credibility." He's betting the voluntary carbon market is poised to expand meaningfully as corporate net-zero commitments accelerate and durable removal methods—things like biochar, direct air capture, mineralization—gain traction over simpler avoidance-based offsets, which have faced mounting criticism over additionality claims and permanence.
Whether that thesis plays out depends on policy shifts, corporate appetite for higher-priced credits, and whether the integrity scandals that have plagued the voluntary market finally give way to more rigorous standards. Varaha, for its part, seems to be building for a world where those standards tighten. Whether buyers show up in the volumes needed to sustain growth at this pace—well, that's the $45 million question.
