What is the SusCrunch Big Pi Grant?

SusCrunch is an initiative that recognises and supports sustainable innovation startups in India. The Big Pi Grant is awarded to companies demonstrating meaningful impact in sustainability — combining commercial viability with genuine environmental or social contribution. The grant and recognition are based on a competitive evaluation process.

Why did Agropak receive the SusCrunch Big Pi recognition?

Agropak was recognised for developing a commercially available bio-composite cosmetic packaging material made from coconut shell powder and bamboo fiber — agricultural byproducts — with no petroleum plastic in the construction. The recognition reflects both the material innovation (93% bio-based carbon content, TÜV SÜD certified) and the commercial readiness of the product, available for brand evaluation and export.

What does the SusCrunch recognition mean for Agropak commercially?

Third-party recognition from a sustainability-focused evaluation programme adds an external credibility signal alongside Agropak's existing certifications. For brands evaluating Agropak as a packaging supplier, the SusCrunch recognition is one data point alongside the TÜV SÜD bio-based content certificate, CIPET structural test reports, and testimonials from brands that have evaluated the material. It is particularly relevant for international buyers where third-party validation of sustainability credentials is part of the onboarding checklist.

Agropak Wins the Big Pi Grant at SusCrunch 2026

Agropak is a natural fiber materials platform, and beauty and personal care packaging is where we have chosen to prove the material system first. This recognition matters to us, and so does the company we shared the stage with.

What SusCrunch Is

SusCrunch is organised by The Sustainability Mafia, a community that brings together founders, investors, institutions and researchers for a day built around climate and sustainability entrepreneurship in India. This year's edition, SusCrunch 2026, was held on 18th July at the Bangalore Creative Circus, bringing together founders, operators, investors and students working across the climate space.

The Big Pi Pitches were part of a full day agenda that also included the Climate Game of Life, a fireside conversation, and the Storyteller Award. Five teams pitched for the ₹31.4 lakh grant this year.

The Finalists

PLANet Zero is building climate resilient modular shelters, incubated at ISB. Shelter is a category where a failure has real, immediate consequences for the people living in it, so the engineering bar is high, and that came through in their pitch.

SparkyAI is working on satellite and AI based crop monitoring, giving farmers earlier, more precise visibility into crop health and field conditions than they typically have access to today. It is a category that depends on getting the underlying science right and then making it usable for someone standing in a field, not just for someone reading a dashboard. That combination, real agronomic depth paired with a genuinely practical interface, is a hard balance to strike, and it was clear from their pitch that a lot of thought had gone into both sides of it.

Aquaholics is building water cleaning robotics, built around technology the team describes as patented. Water contamination is a category with a lot of entrenched, expensive, infrastructure heavy solutions, and building something robotic and scalable in that space, at an early stage, takes real conviction. Their pitch was well structured and clearly thought through, and they handled the judges' questions with composure.

37C was founded by Mukkabir Rahman and works on personal thermal comfort, wearable technology that helps the human body cope with extreme heat directly, rather than cooling the space around it. This addresses a real problem in India, where a large share of the outdoor and industrial workforce has no reliable protection from rising temperatures. Rahman has worked in this space for a few years, including an earlier heat safety wearable project that won national recognition.

All five teams represent genuinely different approaches to hard problems, and we think all of them are worth following.

About The Sustainability Mafia

The Sustainability Mafia's stated principle is give more than you get, and that shows up in how SusCrunch is run, as a community focused event rather than a conventional pitch competition. The same mentors and judges tend to stay involved with the community year on year, which builds a level of context and continuity that is not always common in early stage funding processes.

How We Will Use the Grant

This funding supports three areas of work over the coming months.

Commercial validation: continuing to work with our brand partners on formulation compatibility and onboarding.

Manufacturing readiness: progressing our tooling and process development to move from our current validated stage towards production scale throughput.

Industry pilots: extending our existing paid pilot deployments in cosmetics and hospitality into additional markets.

Over the past few years, manufacturers and prototyping partners told us repeatedly that a plasticizer free, PLA free approach to rigid natural fiber packaging was not practical. Four hundred and seventy five documented trials later, it is. This grant supports taking that validated material system further into commercial use.

We started with beauty and personal care because it is where the case for premium, plastic-free cosmetic packaging is strongest right now, and because it gave us the fastest path to real, validated proof, currently 93% bio-based carbon content, verified by TÜV SÜD. The material system itself is built to extend well beyond a single jar format, and beauty is the first application we intend to prove it in, not the only one.