This startup is turning north India’s crop waste into climate-smart materials

Every winter, images from Punjab and Haryana look the same: rice stubble on fire, smoke drifting across the plains, and pollution choking Delhi’s air. For most, it is an environmental tragedy.

For altM, it is also a design flaw.

Founded in 2022 by Apoorv Garg and Yugal Raj Jain, with scientist Dr. Harshad Velankar as co-founder and CSO, altM is building an “alternate materials” ecosystem that uses agricultural residues – like crop straw – as feedstock for high-value molecules. Think bio-based thickeners and gels for cosmetics, lignin-based resins for adhesives and plywood, and cellulose-derived biodegradable films for packaging.

Both founders grew up in Delhi, then went abroad to deepen their skills – Apoorv at Delhi College of Engineering and UC Berkeley before stints in manufacturing and automotive, Yugal at NSIT and MIT followed by Tesla, where he managed complex engineering programmes. At Tesla, ambiguity and scale were the default – problems weren’t handed over neatly defined; you had to frame them and build systems around them.

When they returned to India in 2021, the winter air made the problem obvious again. Industries like beauty, packaging, coatings, and adhesives are heavily dependent on fossil-based molecules and are notoriously hard to decarbonise. To Apoorv and Yugal, stubble was no longer “waste” – it was raw potential.

Their core idea: waste is an engineering error, not an inevitability.

By 2023, altM had advanced multiple molecules to demonstration scale – fast by biomaterials standards. Cosmetics provided an early win, with bio-based thickeners that could match performance expectations while lowering the carbon footprint. From there, the company began targeting sectors where regulation, sustainability pressure, and performance demands intersect most sharply.

The road is not easy. Biomaterials often suffer from the perception of being expensive “green premiums.” altM’s thesis is the opposite – that with the right engineering, these materials can be price-competitive and scalable. That requires not just lab breakthroughs but robust supply chains, farmer relationships, and industrial partnerships.

To bridge the science gap, the founders brought in Dr. Harshad Velankar as scientific lead, and have been carefully assembling a cross-functional team in a country where “biomaterials” is still an emerging talent category.

Where does this converge – in a single plant or a distributed network of facilities? How will altM navigate the long sales cycles of legacy industries while maintaining startup speed?

The full story – including altM’s pilot projects, scale-up roadmap, and first commercial plant plans – is unpacked in The Indian Dream – 3rd Edition under the Cleantech section.