Cirkla, a sustainable packaging company, has raised $3 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Matrix Partners India and Stellaris Venture Partners, with participation from angel investors.
According to Cirkla, the funds will be used to ramp up its operations, strengthen the salesforce, and invest in new technologies.
Founded by Vaibhav Goel, Ankur Gupta and Kapil Bhardwaj, Cirkla helps brands achieve their sustainability packaging goals through portfolio assessment, design and prototyping and global fulfillment.
In the portfolio assessment phase, Cirkla employs proprietary Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) models to evaluate the environmental impact of the brand’s packaging and prioritize SKUs for maximum sustainability impact. Following this, Cirkla’s in-house packaging team develops alternative packaging solutions. Finally, it leverages its global presence and teams in India, China and the US to manufacture and deliver packaging across various categories.
Matrix and Stellaris announced their India dedicated fund in June 2022 and August 2021 respectively. Since then, Matrix has backed EMTECH, Freakins, Scapia, Genwise, Saveo, Murf AI, XimKart, ZippMat, among others whereas Stellaris led a $4.5 million seed round in front-end devtools startup Kombai in August and $3.6 million pre-Series A funding round in business-to-business (B2B) analytics software firm Factors.ai in the previous month.
