Rikayaa Greentech’s clean-tech bet on high purity tin

At 27, Yash Gupta is refining scrap to produce 99.9 percent pure tin to reduce India’s dependence on imports and develop a clean-tech metals platform

By Monica Bathija

Last Updated: Jan 09, 2026, 12:23 IST3 min

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Yash Gupta, Founder & managing director, Rikayaa Greentech Photo by Madhu Kapparath

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Yash Gupta (27)
Founder & managing director, Rikayaa Greentech

Visits to metal scrapyards and refining facilities as an exchange student to the US and the UK got Yash Gupta interested in metal recycling and refining. Back home in 2020, he set up Rikayaa Enterprises and began by recycling copper and PVC from cable scrap. In its first year, the company was also involved in trading, importing tin ingots and selling them to dealers in India.

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It was during this phase that he saw a gap—most of the tin used in India is imported, primarily from Malaysia and Indonesia. Along with a team of metallurgists and chemical refiners, he began researching how to refine tin from scrap. Gupta wanted to produce 99.9 percent pure tin, traditionally achieved only through tin ore and concentrate processing, and eventually developed a proprietary green process involving hydrometallurgical and pyrometallurgical refining.

“India was already using a lot of natural resources in production of metals and that worried us because natural resources are finite. Our goal was to recycle scrap and build a sustainable alternative,” says the 27-year-old, adding that despite India’s booming electronic and chemical sectors, it lacked the domestic capacity to produce high-purity tin. High-purity tin is a critical input for electronics, semiconductors, electric vehicles, defence equipment and advanced soldering applications.

Starting out with his own savings and later raising money from banks and other financial institutions, Gupta set up a plant in Baddi in Himachal Pradesh and began finding buyers for the company’s tin ingots. Rikayaa Greentech, the tin manufacturing vertical set up in 2021, currently has about 25 to 30 clients, most of whom are end users, although there are also a few traders they supply to.

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“Usually you find a lot of impurities in recycled materials. But this product has 99.9 percent purity, and is equivalent to the virgin product. So that is a big plus point,” says Blessy Yesudas, regional sourcing and procurement manager at MacDermid Alpha Electronics Solutions, a multinational company which is a primary supplier to Apple, Samsung and LG, among others. The company bought Rikayaa’s product after the quality was found to be consistent over three trials, she says. They signed a contract and increased the order from 5 tonnes a month in 2024 to 10 tonnes, and now 25 tonnes for 2026.

Besides global manufacturing accreditations, including ISO 9001, 14001, 22000, ROHS and REACH compliance, Rikayaa Greentech is also the first—and currently the only—company in India to receive a BIS (Bureau of Indian Standards) certification for tin ingots under IS 26:2024.

Rikayaa closed FY24 with a revenue of about ₹37 crore and a profit after tax (PAT) of ₹6.6 crore, says Gupta. In FY25, revenue rose to ₹57 crore with a PAT of ₹9.12 crore. “And this year, we are set to close with a revenue of around ₹100 crore, targeting a PAT of around ₹18 crore,” he claims. Production has gone up from around 10 metric tonnes per month in the first year to around 25 to 30 metric tonnes this year. “The total requirement in India is around 35,000 metric tonnes per annum and our production capacity is around 4,000 metric tonnes,” says Gupta.

Going forward, the company plans to extract other metals, including copper, silver and gold from e-waste, while also exploring opportunities in bismuth recovery. “Research and development efforts are currently underway in these areas,” says Gupta, adding that the vision was always to make India self-reliant in critical mineral recycling. “That’s why our major focus was to build a clean-tech metals platform to produce metals that meet global purity and sustainability standards.”

First Published: Jan 09, 2026, 12:28

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(This story appears in the Jan 09, 2026 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, Click here.)