The Story
Circolife has raised $4.5 million, about ₹40.45 crore, in a pre-Series A round led by Bharat Jaisinghani, joint managing director of Polycab India, in a personal capacity. Participants include Nazara Technologies founder Nitish Mittersain, Intelliquity Ventures, Sumit Jalan, Everest Fleet founder Siddharth Ladsariya, Anand Ladsariya of Everest Flavours, Anant Goenka, Sky Impact Capital, Ideas91 founder Rohit Dev, and the family offices S N Damani and Vyom Wealth. Almost none are conventional venture funds.
The Thane company runs a Cooling-as-a-Service model: it installs high-efficiency air conditioning at a business, charges a monthly fee, and keeps ownership of the equipment for the length of the contract, handling installation, servicing and eventual refurbishment. Abhishek Murarka, Tushar Patil and Devanshu Mishra founded it in 2023. Murarka spent two decades in corporate finance and investment banking, Patil more than 20 years in global sourcing and supply chain, and Mishra, an IIT Roorkee alumnus, works in IoT hardware and firmware.
It has roughly 10,000 active subscriptions across five cities, serving restaurants, hotels, gyms, salons, co-living operators and corporate offices, and employs around 108 people. Every unit carries sensors tracking temperature, power consumption and gas pressure in real time, feeding a predictive-maintenance system that flags failures before they occur. The company is also building AI digital twins of deployed devices, and refurbishes and redeploys units at the end of their working life.
Vineet Taneja, formerly president of Dyson Asia Pacific, chief executive of Micromax and country head of Samsung India, advises the company.
The money funds fleet and geographic expansion, in-house installation and field service, and further work on the IoT predictive-maintenance and digital twin platform. Circolife is targeting 40,000 active units nationally within 24 months.
Cooling-as-a-Service has been drawing capital in India. Smart Joules raised $10 million in a Series B in December through its JouleCool platform, and Tan90 has taken funding for thermal energy storage with a CaaS model for cold chain businesses.
Why It Matters
There is a neat piece of incentive design at the centre of this business, and it is worth spelling out because it is the reason the model is interesting at all.
When a business buys an air conditioner, the person who sold it stops caring the moment the warranty lapses. The unit's efficiency degrades, refrigerant leaks slowly, coils foul, and the electricity bill climbs. None of that is the vendor's problem, and the service contractor is paid per visit, so a machine that runs badly is arguably good for him. This is the ordinary principal-agent problem in appliance maintenance, and it is why commercial air conditioning in India runs far below its rated efficiency.
Circolife owns the machine for the length of the contract. If efficiency falls, the loss lands on the company that installed it, not the restaurant using it. That single change of ownership flips every incentive: the sensors tracking gas pressure and power draw exist because a refrigerant leak is now Circolife's cost, and catching it early is cheaper than a compressor failure. The technology is not there to impress anyone. It is there because the balance sheet demands it.
The end of the contract is where the economics compound. An air conditioner has around a decade of useful life, and a subscription contract does not consume all of it. Recovering most of the unit's cost on the first deployment and then refurbishing and redeploying it means the second and third lives carry far thinner costs. That is what the name is pointing at, and it is only available to a company that owns rather than brokers.
India makes the timing sensible. Cooling demand is rising steeply, commercial electricity is expensive, and a small business that would struggle to justify buying five air conditioners outright will happily pay monthly for them.
The Strategic Read
The word "service" is doing a lot of work, and the balance sheet is where the business actually is.
Going from 10,000 units to 40,000 means buying 30,000 commercial air conditioners. Even at conservative trade prices, that is well over a hundred crore rupees of equipment against a ₹40.45 crore raise. Equity does not fund an asset book of that size, and it should not: capital that expects venture returns is the most expensive possible way to buy depreciating machines. What Circolife will need is debt, at a rate low enough that the spread between the monthly subscription and the cost of financing the unit leaves something behind. That spread is the business. Everything else, the sensors, the digital twins, the app, is in service of protecting it.
Which explains a cap table that has almost no venture funds on it. A listed electricals company's joint managing director, two family offices, a fleet operator, a flavours manufacturer, a market investor. This is money that reads depreciation schedules for a living and is comfortable with assets on a balance sheet. It is the right capital for the model, and it is also a signal that conventional venture funds found it hard to underwrite.
The field service problem is the one that will decide this. A hundred and eight people currently support 10,000 units. At 40,000 units across many more cities, every breakdown is Circolife's cost rather than the customer's, and response times determine whether a restaurant renews. Owned-asset models live or die on service density, which is why the round explicitly funds in-house installation and field teams rather than outsourcing them. Having Vineet Taneja advising is relevant here for a reason that has nothing to do with brand: running Samsung India and Micromax means having built appliance service networks at national scale, which is precisely the problem between five cities and forty thousand units.
The competitive risk sits with the people making the machines. Polycab, Voltas, Blue Star and Daikin all have distribution, service networks and balance sheets far deeper than a pre-Series A company. If subscription cooling works, an incumbent can copy it without needing to raise anything. Circolife's answer has to be the data: several years of sensor readings across a large fleet is a genuine asset, and it is the thing Mittersain pointed to in backing the round. Whether it compounds fast enough to matter before a manufacturer notices is the open question.
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