BITS Pilani's flagship start up accelerator, Conquest, supports a new generation of founders through a zero cost, zero equity model, helping India rethink what it does with the things it throws away.
From chicken feathers turning into compostable plastic, to non recyclable waste becoming furniture grade board, to foundations that skip excavation entirely, this year's Circular Economy & Sustainable Materials cohort treats waste less like a disposal problem and more like an untapped supply chain. Some are going after the plastic and agricultural waste piling up in landfills. Others are targeting the slower, quieter inefficiencies buried in construction sites, textile mills and electronics factories.
Let us meet the innovators leading the way. NovoEarth: turning poultry waste into plastic's replacement Founder: Sarthak Gupta Founded in: 2016 The world generates over 400 million tonnes of plastic waste a year, driving microplastic contamination deep into agricultural soil. At the same time, the poultry industry produces millions of tonnes of feather waste that mostly ends up landfilled or incinerated, with no productive second life. NovoEarth solves both problems from the same raw material. Its proprietary process extracts keratin protein from discarded chicken feathers and transforms it into a compostable, thermally stable biopolymer strong enough to replace conventional plastic in agricultural mulch films and packaging. The company has already validated the material through real world trials with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, and its product is certified by CIPET. NovoEarth was incubated by SIIC IIT Kanpur and Social Alpha, and has filed patents and trademarks around its extraction process. EcoFurnish: giving non recyclable plastic a second life as furniture grade board Founders: Aadi Shravan, Ayush Panwar Founded in: 2025 | HQ: Noida, Uttar Pradesh The furniture and construction industries lean heavily on plywood and MDF, driving deforestation, even as large volumes of non-recyclable plastic waste pile up because traditional recycling can't handle them economically. EcoFurnish's answer is PEP Boards: a proprietary, patent pending process that converts non recyclable plastic waste into a waterproof, termite proof, lightweight and fire retardant board built to substitute plywood and MDF. The start up has secured a strategic partnership with Ekara Financials, received a 3 lakh grant from IIT Guwahati for prototyping and pilot deployment, and picked up wins across ideathons at IIT Delhi, IIT Guwahati, DTU, DU and MUIT. C-DISC Technologies (PEN Foundation): construction that skips excavation altogether Founders: Jeesh Venmarath, Hemanth Chodisetti Founded in: 2025 | HQ: Kozhikode, Kerala Foundation work alone accounts for 30, 40 percent of construction schedule delays, and conventional methods degrade soil and deplete groundwater in the process, with little innovation to show for a century of building. C DISC Technologies' PEN Foundation system uses precast concrete nodes and engineered ground nails to install in just 2, 4 hours, with zero excavation, concrete mixing or curing, while delivering 1.6x to 2.76x higher bearing capacity than conventional foundations. The system is already deployed across live eco resort, residential and community infrastructure projects, validated by NIT Calicut and IIT Kanpur, and GRIHA certified with roughly 52 percent lower embodied carbon. It carries a granted design patent and a filed technology patent, and has drawn over 100 inbound enquiries with zero marketing spend. Greenathon Technologies: replacing chemical treatment with microbes Founders: Sarika Gupta, Ashish Kumar Dubey Founded in: 2020 | HQ: Jaipur, Rajasthan Textile and paper industries still rely on resource intensive, chemical heavy processing that drives up costs, consumes large volumes of water, and leaves industrial effluent difficult to treat effectively. Greenathon Technologies has developed patented, microbial and enzyme based alternatives to that chemical dependence: MICRO BIOZYME, which biodegrades pollutants in industrial wastewater, and BIO DEINK SOL, which uses enzymes to de ink recycled paper. Together, they enable up to 80 percent wastewater reuse. The start up has won the 25 lakh Rajiv Gandhi Innovation Award, received the BIRAC BIG grant, drawn support from the Ministry of MSME and the Department of Science & Technology, and run more than 350 industrial trials across Rajasthan. Anuna Labs: mining e-waste for the electronics supply chain Founder: Raghav Khandelwal Founded in: 2025 | HQ: Bengaluru, Karnataka Electronics manufacturers lose valuable metal every time e waste is inefficiently recycled, and are left dependent on expensive imported conductive materials like silver, since conventional copper alternatives oxidise too fast to be reliable. Anuna Labs closes that loop by converting e waste into oxidation resistant copper nanoparticles, inks, pastes and foils, through a patented, carbon negative, low energy manufacturing process, giving manufacturers a sustainable and cost effective alternative to silver based materials. The start up won Startup Karnataka Elevate 2024, was recognised as the State Level Best Project of the Year by the Karnataka State Council for Science and Technology, took home the Best Innovation Award at Hack4Purpose 2024, and topped both Schemcon 2024 and Chemovation 2024. Put together, these five start ups make the case that India's circular economy won't be built on a single material or fix, it will be built waste stream by waste stream. NovoEarth and EcoFurnish are proving that feathers and plastic don't have to be dead ends, C DISC Technologies is rethinking how buildings even touch the ground, and Greenathon Technologies and Anuna Labs are showing that industrial pollution and electronic scrap can be sources of value rather than liabilities. Conquest continues to back founders working on exactly this range of problems, through its zero cost, zero equity accelerator model. The online phase of Conquest is currently in motion, featuring intensive mentorship and founder support, ahead of an offline week in Bengaluru that will culminate in this year's Demo Day. To stay updated, visit Conquest's official website at conquestbits.org or visit us at linkedin.com/company/conquestbits