Abhinav Shekhar Vashistha, Co-founder and CTO, WeVOIS Labs Pvt Ltd
Picture: Madhu Kapparath; Directed By: Kapil Kashyap Background Photograph: Shutterstock
WeVois was based in 2018, however Abhinav Shekhar Vashistha (29, co-founder and CTO) and Abhishek Gupta’s (31, co-founder and CEO) waste administration journey began in faculty in 2016. From organising zero-waste faculty festivals to creating an app to record public bathrooms, and dustbins, in Balmer, Rajasthan, or constructing good dustbins, the duo isn’t new to waste administration.
Abhinav Shekhar Vashistha (29)
Co-founder and CTO, WeVOIS Labs Pvt Ltd
What has modified, although, over time, is the shift from a project-based mindset to their dedication to construct a scalable, sustainable and worthwhile waste administration enterprise.
WeVois was included in 2018 to offer an Web-of-Issues-enabled door-to-door good waste assortment facility for city areas. That is necessary as a result of conventional strategies typically miss 30 to 40 % households, resulting in open dumping or burning of waste.
The corporate’s app creates an optimised route after surveying an space—together with “polluters” like residences, inns, hostels, hospitals and so forth, accounting for the variety of assortment autos accessible and the gathering time. The motive force then will get an optimised route on an app, with estimated pace and time to finish the route.
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Each property that has signed up for WeVois’s assortment companies is marked with an RFID tag. The waste collectors learn the RFID tag at each assortment level to mark “attendance” and guarantee environment friendly and secure assortment. The RFID system additionally helps calculate month-to-month salaries and reward based mostly on efficiency.
Presently, the corporate is working with 20 municipalities in Rajasthan and operating pilots in Dehradun and Jammu & Kashmir. It employs 1,000 employees instantly whereas 500 others are registered on the app through different corporations that use their expertise for waste assortment. WeVois says its workers are given social advantages, most of them for the primary time, together with medical insurance.
Nevertheless, assortment is only one a part of the gargantuan waste administration problem. Aside from offering an everyday waste assortment facility and employment for over 1,000 folks, WeVois additionally acts as a dependable waste supplier to recyclers. Vashishtha says there are sufficient waste processing vegetation in each metropolis, however they aren’t operational resulting from unreliable or contaminated waste. WeVois additionally segregates waste and has arrange its processing vegetation.
Additionally learn: This company manages nearly 90% of Mumbai’s municipal waste
Bootstrapped from 2018 until 2021, the corporate acquired a ₹20 lakh grant from the Ministry of Housing and City Affairs in 2022. In the identical yr, it additionally raised ₹4.4 crore in a seed spherical from Innovana ThinkLabs and UPAYA social ventures. Thus far, in 2025, the corporate has raised ₹36 crore in Sequence A from Negen Capital, Vyom Ventures, Marshot (Razorpay founders), SN Capital, and different excessive net-worth people.
Vashistha explains that the duo goals to run their enterprise like a enterprise and never solely a social affect enterprise. He claims the corporate has been worthwhile because the first month of operations and all the cash raised goes into growth, new tasks, pilots and analysis. In FY24, the corporate clocked ₹33 crore in revenues and a revenue after tax (PAT) of ₹2.91 crore. The corporate estimates it is going to shut FY25 with a income of ₹50 crore with roughly 10 % PAT.
Galloping to create 100 zero-waste cities in India over the subsequent decade, Vashishtha is optimistic that India can remedy its waste downside. It gained’t be simple although: “Consumer behaviour has to vary and India’s densely populated cities would possibly simply make it cost-effective.”
Swami Prem Parivartan aka Peepal Baba, Forbes India Underneath 30 jury for the class, says, “Their imaginative and prescient to develop presence to over 500 cities and empowering a further 20,000 employees is exceptional. Their future potential is immense.”
(This story seems within the 07 February, 2025 subject
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