Channel capital into companies with huge potential impact on society, environment: Blue Ashva Capital's Satya Bansal

Satya Bansal, Founder and CEO, Blue Ashva Capital Image: Neha Mithbawkar for Forbes India

Multiple venture capital (VC) firms are consciously funding startups that are addressing climate change concerns, and devising solutions for a clean and sustainable world. Read about them here.


Satya Bansal started Blue Ashva Capital in 2019 after a three-decade career in banking. For him, it was a return to his roots, in some ways, having started life in a small village in Rajasthan. He wanted to find ways of enabling entrepreneurs who were attempting to solve big problems for India in a sustainable fashion.

“Blue Ashva is a platform to channelise capital into businesses that are required by society, but at the same time have huge potential to bring positive change in society and the environment,” Bansal says. “One of my first loves has been around cleantech and climate change, and that evolved as a theme as we set up the fund.”

 Bansal set up the fund in India and Singapore and, by 2020, money had been raised to the tune of $150 million. After an international career, the banker had returned to India in 2007 and one of the earliest investments he’d made as an angel investor was Carbon Clean Solutions, started by two graduates of IIT-Kharagpur, developing a carbon capture technology.

 “As I worked more with these kinds of startups, in a way I got reverse-mentored,” Bansal says. Today, Blue Ashva has backed startups such as Bambrew, developing sustainable packaging, Devic Earth, which offers an air pollution control technology, and Greenjoules, a biofuels venture.

 “It’s not so easy to identify the opportunities to invest in this sector, because it’s still nascent (in India),” he says. Figuring this out also led to setting up of Blue Ashva Labs, to help entrepreneurs take ideas from proof-of-concept levels to commercialisation.