Minimac raises ₹30 crore to expand lubricant recycling

At an industrial plant, a lubricant that has picked up contaminants does not necessarily have to leave the site. Pune-based Minimac Systems brings its mobile treatment units directly to factories through its “Recycling on Wheels” service, restoring recoverable oil where it is used instead of transporting it to a treatment facility. The startup has now raised ₹30 Cr to expand that model across India.

The round was led by Rainmatter, Zerodha’s investment arm. Minimac plans to direct the money into research and development of miniaturised fluid-treatment infrastructure, fleet automation and fluid analytics, while also deepening its recycling technology and expanding doorstep services. Its broader offering covers monitoring lubricant condition and contamination inside industrial equipment, then removing contaminants to restore recoverable lubricant.

The opportunity is tied to the scale of India’s industrial oil use. The country consumes more than 5 Mn tonnes of lubricants and greases annually and imports more than 60% of its base oil requirements, with an annual import bill exceeding $2.7 Bn. Minimac expects lubricant demand to grow between 4-5% annually over the next five years.

So what changes in practice? More industrial plants could assess and restore lubricant onsite, reducing the need to move used oil to a separate treatment facility and keeping equipment lubricant in productive use for longer. Minimac says it has already deployed more than 2,500 miniaturised fluid-treatment systems, worked across more than 2,200 industrial assets and kept over 14 Mn litres of lubricant in productive use. Its customers include NTPC, Adani Power, JSW Steel, Tata Steel, Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum, Hindustan Petroleum, Reliance Industries, Shell and ExxonMobil.

The company’s figures and targets are not independently verified in the published account. Minimac aims to help abate 860 gigagrams of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by 2034, but the published account does not provide an independent assessment of that target or of the claimed installed capacity of over 3 Lakh liters per minute. The technology is already deployed, while the new funding is intended to widen its reach.