Sustainability Champion who landed investment from Dia Mirza & Ranbir Kapoor Aditya Ruia, 27, Co-founder, Beco

With a degree in Manufacturing Engineering from BITS Pilani, Aditya Ruia has previously headed the start-up Quorg, which is a professional messaging platform that enables seamless collaboration and communication between working professionals. After traversing through various creative avenues, and with a strong focus on brand development through marketing technology and distribution, he co-founded Beco along with Akshay Verma, and Anuj Ruia. At Beco, he is responsible for Tech, Strategy, Execution, and Team Building. Talking about the coming together of the trio to build Beco, Ruia shares, "The Beco journey began when Akshay, Anuj, and I were on a beach cleanup, where we discovered a chocolate wrapper, which, as it turns out, was discontinued in the 1990s. This wrapper was fresh as if it was disposed of just the previous evening. This served as a rude shock, opening our eyes to just how long a piece of plastic can last, causing irreversible damage to marine life, and other ecosystems. It was then that we decided to launch Beco, a sustainable and 100% environmentally safe brand, with a vision to provide effective, affordable, and accessible alternatives to daily and single-use plastics."

The D2C-enabled startup develops 100% plastic-free consumer goods in the kitchen, home and personal care space. They provide affordable and eco-friendly alternatives to single-use products to help Indians switch to a more sustainable lifestyle 'one Beco product at a time'. They are making sustainable homecare products easily accessible at an affordable price to customers. With 5 lac users across channels with B2B clientele spread across all offices of WeWork in India, BBlunt Salons, Isprava Stays, Taj, and Vistara Airlines, they have established a presence in 5000 stores pan India.

In the last quarter, they introduced 5 new and innovative products in 2022 - detergent sheets, floor cleaning sheets, color catcher sheets, and fabric softener sheets, which are 100% plastic-free and use 70% less water in their solutions. They also launched a 94% plastic-free carton-refill solution for home cleaner liquids, as a solution to the constant purchase and accumulation of plastic refill bottles and pouches in this domain. As per Ruia, "We're gunning for 100 cr ARR next FY and expand our offline presence to 10,000 stores."

Factsheet

● No. of co-founders: 3

● Number of employees: 50+

● Year of inception of the company: 2019

● Investors in the idea: Rukam Capital, Priyavrat Mafatlal, Rohit Sharma, Dia Mirza, Aamir Khan Productions, Ranbir Kapoor, Sequoia Capital, Climate Angels