Introducing Econovus
Every conversation about India’s manufacturing moment is about the factory. The machines, the assembly lines, the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes. Almost nobody talks about what happens after the product rolls off the line, when it has to survive a truck to a port, a month at sea, and a forklift at the other end.
That journey runs on packaging. And the best of this industry is genuinely good. Global players like Nefab and Signode have spent decades turning packaging into an engineering discipline, and they have served large Indian Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) well. They set the benchmark for what engineered packaging looks like. But they are global companies, built around global accounts and global cost structures, and that layer thins out quickly in India.
For a large share of Indian industry, packaging is still bought locally and treated as a cost line rather than an engineering decision: wooden crates that are often oversized, single-use, and heavier than they need to be. The result is a quiet leak that compounds across the system: money spent on material that gets discarded, container space wasted on air, and a carbon footprint that shows up in every customer’s Scope 3 emissions (emissions from a company’s supply chain rather than its own operations) audit.
For a country whose engineering exports crossed a record $122 billion in FY26, nearly 28 percent of total merchandise exports, this is not a rounding error. It is a structural inefficiency sitting inside every supply chain we are trying to build.
Why this problem stays unsolved
Here is the thing about industrial packaging: identifying the waste is easy. Anyone who has watched a half-empty container leave a port can see it. What is hard is building packaging that OEMs actually switch to.
An OEM shipping automotive components or lithium-ion batteries is not going to adopt greener packaging as a favour to the planet. The new packaging has to be recyclable, lighter, and cheaper, all at once, at production scale, without asking the customer to compromise on safety or compliance. Miss any one of those and the plant manager goes back to the wooden crate. This is why, despite the presence of capable incumbents at the top of the market, the long tail of the sector has stayed fragmented. Sustainability that costs more does not sell in B2B. Sustainability that saves money sells itself.
What Econovus builds
Econovus Packaging, founded in Pune in 2019 by Ramesh Prasad, treats packaging as an engineering problem rather than a carpentry one. The company designs bespoke, end-to-end packaging using its own Intellectual Property (IP) backed engineered materials, space optimisation, and a design-to-cost methodology (designing to hit a target cost from the start rather than costing a finished design).
The portfolio reads like a map of India’s industrial ambitions: United Nations (UN) certified packaging for lithium-ion batteries, heavy-duty export packaging, returnable and expendable systems, and automotive packaging across Completely Knocked Down (CKD), Semi Knocked Down (SKD), and Completely Built Up (CBU) (formats in which vehicles are shipped, from full kits of parts to finished units) shipments.
The outcomes are measured the way a Chief Financial Officer would measure them: lower logistics costs, better container utilisation, and a lower total cost of ownership. The carbon reduction comes along for the ride, which is exactly why it sticks.
Two other things stood out to us. Econovus has been bootstrapped and profitable since day one, which in packaging, a business of thin margins and demanding customers, tells you the unit economics are real and not a pitch-deck artefact. And it has done this while serving sectors where the compliance bar is unforgiving, from lithium-ion cells to defence.
Why Rainmatter invested
At Rainmatter, we have written before about India’s manufacturing moment and about climate investing that works through cost curves rather than conscience. Econovus sits at the intersection of both. Decarbonising supply chains will not happen through pledges. It will happen when the greener option is also the cheaper, better-engineered option, and someone does the unglamorous work of proving that at production scale.
There is a second thread here that matters to us. If India is serious about being a manufacturing nation, it cannot outsource every layer of the manufacturing stack. The companies that engineer how Indian goods move through the world should, at least some of them, be Indian.
Nefab and Signode earned their positions, and competing with them is a high bar precisely because they are good. That is the point. We want an Indian company that clears that bar, designing here, manufacturing here, and priced for Indian supply chains, the same way we have backed indigenisation in other layers of the manufacturing ecosystem. Econovus is our bet on that company in packaging.
Econovus has spent seven years doing that work quietly. We are leading its first institutional round, a Rs 40 crore pre-Series A, with participation from Rockstud Capital. The funds will go towards expanding into automotive, lithium-ion batteries, solar infrastructure, steel, defence, and broader industrial supply chains, along with an integrated manufacturing facility in Pune and a dedicated design centre.
As Ramesh puts it, India’s manufacturing future will require packaging that is engineered, digital, and sustainable. The investment enables Econovus to scale that platform and accelerate the industry’s transition towards zero-waste packaging.
The factory gets the headlines. The crate gets the product there. We are glad to back the team that figured out the crate.
