Singapore-based investment management firm Circulate Capital has committed $150 million (approximately ₹1,425 crore) from its second fund to back recycling companies across India.
The capital commitment follows strong financial exits and operational success from the firm’s inaugural fund in the country. This fresh allocation is part of a larger $300 million Asia Fund II, which recently achieved an oversubscribed first close at $220 million. The fund is backed by a coalition of global consumer giants and development financial institutions, including Coca-Cola, Dow Chemicals, Procter & Gamble, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and Proparco.
Shifting Focus: From Plastic Waste to Critical Materials
While Circulate Capital’s initial investments focused primarily on building institutional-grade plastic recycling capacity, the second fund is aggressively expanding its mandate to target industrial supply chain vulnerabilities.
The core growth strategy focuses on two distinct areas:
1. Hedging Against China’s Critical Mineral Dominance
A massive structural tailwind has emerged around industrial metals, including aluminium, copper, and rare earth elements. With China controlling a vast portion of global critical mineral value chains, international electronics and battery manufacturers are racing to secure independent resource pipelines.
Circulate Capital plans to use Indian recycling networks as a strategic hedge against this geopolitical dependency.
“We see the opportunity for recovering these materials already extracted from the environment that are trapped in our devices, our cars, or refrigerators. Recycling is a key hedge against supply chain risks.”
— Rob Kaplan, Founder and CEO of Circulate Capital
2. Scaling Profitable Circular Economy SMEs
The fund targets established Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and family-led waste management businesses that possess a 10-to-20-year track record. The ideal target profiles are firms that are already structurally profitable, maintaining annual revenue benchmarks between $20 million and $30 million.
Proven Early Success in the Indian Market
The $150 million commitment follows a string of successful institutional partnerships and product-integration achievements from Circulate Capital’s early Indian portfolio:
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Lucro Plastecycle: Specializing in recycling challenging flexible and multilayer plastic packaging, the firm gained major validation when consumer giant Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL) acquired a 14.3% strategic stake in the company.
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Srichakra Polyplast: Operating India’s first food-grade, bottle-to-bottle recycling facility, the company successfully institutionalized its operations to supply high-quality recycled PET plastics directly to multinational beverage giants PepsiCo and Coca-Cola.
Circulate Capital Capital Overview:
[========================================] $500 Million Total Raised Since Inception (2020)
[======================>] $300 Million Asia Fund II Target
[===========>] $150 Million Allocated Exclusively to India
Environmental and Financial Impact Projections
Over the next ten years, Circulate Capital’s second fund aims to transform local supply chains across South and Southeast Asia by embedding rigid environmental and operational performance metrics into its investee companies:
| Impact Metric | 10-Year Target Goal |
| New Infrastructure Capacity | Finance nearly 2 million tonnes of collection and recycling capacity |
| Waste Diversion | Prevent a cumulative 30 million tonnes of unmanaged environmental waste |
| Emissions Reduction | Avoid or directly reduce more than 50 million tonnes of CO2 emissions |
| Diversity Frameworks | At least 50% of the portfolio aligned to 2x Gender-Smart Investing targets on exit |
By moving beyond standard municipal plastics into high-value electronics, appliance tracking, and rare earth recovery, the investment framework aims to prove that treating waste as a localized asset can drive commercial-grade financial returns while securing critical domestic manufacturing loops.
