Every year, as autumn settles over North India, the sky turns a hazy, apocalyptic grey. The smoke, thick with the ghosts of harvested paddy, is a visceral reminder of a problem we see, smell, and breathe, yet have failed to solve at scale. Millions of tonnes of agricultural residue, a byproduct of our nation’s food security, become a crippling environmental burden. For decades, the conversation has been stuck between farmer economics and ecological collapse. What if the problem wasn’t the waste itself, but a profound failure of imagination?
Thousands of miles away, in the high-stakes, high-pressure world of Tesla’s Gigafactories, Apoorv Garg and Yugal Raj Jain were solving problems of a different kind. They were at the heart of the electric vehicle revolution, scaling manufacturing for the Model 3 and Model Y, turning ambitious blueprints into millions of cars on global roads. They lived and breathed first-principles thinking, supply chain optimisation, and the relentless pursuit of manufacturing efficiency. It’s a world away from the smouldering fields of Punjab, yet it’s precisely this experience that they’ve brought back to India to build altM, a startup that sees a future for India not just as a software giant, but as a global leader in sustainable, bio-based materials.
The story of altM is not just another climate-tech pitch. It is a story about manufacturing, about seeing a supply chain where others see only waste. It’s about applying the hard-won lessons from scaling the world’s most advanced manufacturing operations to one of India’s most intractable agricultural challenges.
The Structural Disconnect
To understand what altM is building, you have to understand the chasm they are trying to bridge. On one side, you have an agricultural economy that produces an estimated 500 million tonnes of residue annually. A significant portion of this is either burned, contributing to the air quality crisis that chokes our cities, or left to decompose, releasing methane. For the farmer, this residue is a liability, something that costs time and money to clear before the next sowing season.
On the other side, you have a massive industrial economy. Packaging, textiles, cosmetics, chemicals, construction, all heavily reliant on materials derived from fossil fuels. They use plastics, polymers, and synthetic compounds that are resource-intensive to produce and create their own legacy of pollution. The raw material for a more sustainable future is being burned in fields, while factories continue to depend on a finite, polluting alternative. This is the structural inefficiency altM was founded to fix.
Apoorv’s journey crystallized this realisation. After leaving Tesla, he joined Prometheus Fuels, a company deep in the world of carbon capture and sustainable aviation fuel. He saw brilliant scientific breakthroughs that held the potential to reshape industries. But he also saw a recurring pattern: world-changing chemistry often struggled to make the leap from the lab to the production line. The science was there, but the ability to scale it reliably and cost-effectively was missing.
Yugal, meanwhile, was back in India, exploring the landscape for biomaterials and bio-plastics. He saw the same gap from the opposite direction. India had the raw material, the engineering talent, and the manufacturing ambition. What it lacked was the connective tissue, the operational excellence to build a globally competitive biomaterials industry. Their paths, which had run parallel at Tesla, converged on a single, powerful idea: the biggest challenge wasn’t inventing a new molecule, it was building the machine to produce it at scale.
Applying the Gigafactory Playbook
What does it mean to apply the “Tesla playbook” to agricultural residue? It means you stop thinking like a scientist and start thinking like a systems engineer. You obsess over the entire value chain, from procurement to final product, with the same intensity you would apply to a battery production line.
Step 1: Solving the Supply Chain
The first, and perhaps most difficult, piece of the puzzle is procurement. How do you collect millions of tonnes of straw, husk, and stubble from scattered farms and transport it to a processing facility efficiently? This is a logistics problem of immense complexity. altM is tackling this by building a decentralised network, creating collection points and partnerships that provide farmers with a new, reliable source of income for their “waste”. This immediately changes the dynamic. The residue transforms from a liability into an asset, aligning the incentives of the farmer with the goals of the company.
Step 2: Engineering for Scale, Not Just the Lab
The core of altM’s innovation lies in its proprietary processing technology. Instead of building large, monolithic, and capital-intensive plants, their approach is modular. This allows for faster deployment, lower initial capex, and the ability to set up processing facilities closer to the source of the residue, cutting down on transportation costs. This is classic manufacturing thinking, designing a system for flexibility and incremental scaling rather than betting everything on one massive factory. They are building the infrastructure for a new kind of chemistry, one that is sustainable, distributed, and deeply integrated with the agricultural ecosystem.
Step 3: A Platform, Not a Single Product
The end result is not one single “magic material”. altM’s platform is designed to produce a range of industrial biomaterials. These can be used to create biodegradable packaging, additives for cosmetics, fibres for textiles, and inputs for various chemical industries. By treating the agricultural residue as a versatile feedstock, they can cater to multiple downstream markets, de-risking their business and creating a flywheel effect. As they scale production and bring down costs, their materials become a viable alternative to petroleum-based incumbents across a growing number of sectors.
“India’s kirana stores are the backbone of the country’s retail economy, yet the procurement infrastructure serving them has barely evolved in decades. The inefficiency isn’t incidental; it’s structural.”
While that quote is from Prateek Bansal of Fairdeal.Market, a B2B commerce startup, the sentiment applies perfectly to what altM is doing for the industrial materials space. They are identifying a structural inefficiency in a legacy supply chain and rebuilding it from the ground up using technology, operational excellence, and a first-principles approach.
The Second-Order Effects: Building a New Economy
The vision here extends far beyond the company’s own balance sheet. If altM succeeds, the ripple effects across the Indian economy could be profound. For the first time, a large-scale economic incentive would exist to not burn crop residue. This could have a material impact on air quality and public health in North India, a positive externality of immense value.
It also represents a significant step in positioning India as a hub for the global circular economy. For too long, our manufacturing story has been about cost arbitrage. Ventures like altM are changing that narrative. They are building deep-tech companies with globally relevant IP, solving fundamental problems for the planet, and doing it from India. This is the kind of innovation that attracts a different class of capital, the kind of patient, long-term investment that is increasingly flowing towards climate and deeptech, even as the broader venture market sees a slowdown.
We are seeing dedicated funds, like the new F2A platform from Fundamentum’s co-founder, being raised specifically for AI and deeptech. Investors are actively looking for companies building hard things, solving fundamental problems. The era of purely software-driven growth is giving way to a more balanced ecosystem where atoms, not just bits, create immense value.
What Apoorv and Yugal are building is a testament to a new breed of Indian entrepreneur. They are globally experienced, technically deep, and mission-driven. They are not just building an app; they are building the physical and chemical infrastructure for a more sustainable industrial future. They saw how to build the future of transportation at Tesla. Now, they are back home, building the future of materials, one stalk of paddy straw at a time.
