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By Impact News Point | Ranchi | March 2026
RANCHI Manish Piyush grew up in Ranchi, studied engineering at BIT Mesra, got an MBA from IIM Indore, and then spent eight years working in 14 countries for the Tata Group before returning to Mumbai as General Manager of Tata Motors. By any conventional measure, he had made it. He was earning a salary worth Rs 1 crore a year. He was living in Mumbai. He was doing global work. Then in 2017, he came home to Ranchi for the Momentum Jharkhand investment conclave, and had a conversation at the event that changed the direction of his life. “The people said all the money spent was in vain as there is no local ecosystem to support it,” he later recalled. “So we decided to have a startup specifically in Ranchi to support local systems, encourage youngsters and develop an ecosystem to support new talent.” A few days after that conversation, Manish resigned from his Tata Motors job, called his childhood friend and fellow BIT Mesra graduate Aditya Kumar who was also in a corporate role and they both quit. They had no background in dairy or food. They did not know how to code. They bought five cows and became milkmen.
The problem they were trying to solve sounds simple: Ranchi did not have access to unadulterated, chemical-free milk. When Manish had tried to find good quality milk for his child after returning to the city, he could not find a brand he trusted. He also got a contract to build software for a state-run dairy and saw, from the inside, what went into the milk that was being processed. “The type of processes and chemicals that go into the treatment of milk is really scary,” he said. That revelation became the founding impulse of Puresh Daily Foods. Manish and Aditya started a small farm at Ormanjhi on the outskirts of Ranchi in November 2018, supplying milk to five friends and relatives. They learned to code themselves, because there was no software talent available locally for what they wanted to build. They learned dairy farming, because they could not advise farmers unless they understood it. Within a year, Puresh Daily had 1,000 customers, was delivering over 1,000 litres per day, and was profitable. By 2021, it had raised Rs 1.2 crore in seed funding from Dhianu Das of Alfa Ventures and Agility Venture Partners, expanded to Ranchi, Bokaro, Ramgarh, Jamshedpur, and Patna, and had customers on a subscription model receiving farm-fresh milk in glass bottles every morning before 9 a.m. The company’s annual turnover reached Rs 3 crore, its valuation Rs 15 crore. But those are not the numbers Manish leads with. The number he leads with is the one about going from five litres of milk a day to 1,000. That was the proof of concept that everything else grew from. The milk costs Rs 60 per litre more expensive than every branded competitor. The customers keep coming. The quality is the argument.
Harshit Poddar and Anuvrat Saboo were 26 years old when they started SafEarth Clean Technologies in Ranchi in 2017. They had studied engineering together at RV College of Engineering in Bengaluru and had both worked at a renewable energy startup where they watched a market that should have been growing quickly remain largely stuck. The problem was structural: buying a solar plant is a major decision that most people make only once in their lives, yet the industry had built no consumer-centric system to help them make it. There were dozens of vendors, manufacturers, financiers, and execution companies all operating separately, with no platform connecting them and the result was that even buyers who wanted to switch to solar kept putting it off because the process was too complicated and the risk of choosing the wrong vendor felt too high. SafEarth was built to solve exactly that: a SaaS platform that brings solar users, component manufacturers, financiers, and project execution companies onto a single interface, reducing project costs by 7 to 10 percent, cutting time by 40 to 50 percent, and taking errors to zero, according to Harshit. The company bootstrapped entirely on the founders’ personal savings. It did not raise outside investor money. It grew on its revenues. As of 2024, SafEarth had annual revenues of Rs 6.15 crore, had facilitated over Rs 100 crore in renewable energy investment across India, was saving more than 50,000 tonnes of carbon emissions every year, and had clients including Toyota, Graphite India, Golcha Associated, and the CK Birla Group. It had also raised $427,000 in total external funding from Mumbai Angels, Anthill Ventures, and Gruhas. Two 26-year-olds from Ranchi had built a clean energy company used by Toyota and the CK Birla Group. They did it from a registered address on Court Road, Ranchi.
Shyam Murmu is from Ghatsila, East Singhbhum a small town on the Subarnarekha river, known for its connection to writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and not, historically, for producing technology entrepreneurs. He built a company called Galang: an augmented reality platform for tribal cultural tourism. The idea addresses a real market failure. India’s experiential tourism sector is worth Rs 30,000 crore. Tribal communities across Jharkhand, Odisha, and Chhattisgarh sit at the centre of some of the most distinctive cultural heritage in Asia the art, the music, the forest knowledge, the architecture, the festivals. Almost none of this has been monetised in a way that sends money back to the communities that created it. Galang uses AR technology to build immersive cultural experiences around tribal communities letting travellers engage with indigenous art, ritual, and landscape in ways that require the community’s active participation and generate income that stays local. Shyam presented Galang at Startup Mahakumbh 2024 at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi the world’s largest startup and innovation showcase, with more than 3,000 startups from across India and abroad. He had been selected by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Government of India, to represent Jharkhand at the Dharti Aaba Birsa Munda Tribepreneur Pavilion. At the event, three investors expressed informal interest in Galang, and several academic institutions indicated interest in collaboration. A young man from Ghatsila pitched an AR company in the same hall where global investors were evaluating startups from across the world. He reported that his brochures and bookmarks were exhausted by the first day.
Varsha Mario Kachhap was at the same Startup Mahakumbh 2024, also selected by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, also from Jharkhand, also a member of the Tribal Design Forum. Her company is Tribalverse, a metaverse platform for tribal art that allows users to explore and purchase indigenous art through augmented reality and virtual reality, with work available as NFTs and in physical form. The platform sits at the intersection of technology and cultural sovereignty: it gives tribal artists control over how their work is presented, distributed, and priced, without requiring them to hand that control to gallery owners or export middlemen. Varsha describes her own work as sitting at the intersection of culture, spatial storytelling, and social justice. She is currently also working as Assistant Project Manager at Adivasi Lives Matter in Mumbai, and was recently part of a project documenting tribal music specifically the role of song as memory, knowledge, and resistance in Adivasi communities. Her startup and her advocacy work are the same argument in two different forms: that tribal communities have the right to tell their own stories, own their own cultural output, and profit from their own heritage. Tribalverse is the technology through which that argument is being made concrete.
Kundan Mishra did not leave Jharkhand. That is the essential fact about his story. He grew up in Bokaro. He could have moved to a metro. He chose not to. In June 2020 in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown he and his brother Abhishek Mishra started CustKart: a merchandise startup based in Bokaro that sells customised t-shirts, caps, hoodies, and branded merchandise to engineering and medical colleges, corporate entities, and educational institutions, particularly those in small towns that large metro-based suppliers do not prioritise. The insight behind CustKart is that the colleges in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities have exactly the same need for customized institutional merchandise as the IITs and IIMs; they just have no one serving them well. Within one year of starting, CustKart had completed orders for more than 25 engineering and medical colleges across India. By 2021, it had clocked a turnover of Rs 50 lakh. Clients had come from as far as Nagaland. “Our clients now come from places as far off as Nagaland,” Kundan told YourStory. He said he always wanted to work in his hometown and create jobs for locals so that they would never have to leave their families to find work elsewhere. That sentence about not wanting people to have to leave is the sentence that describes half the economic problem of Jharkhand in a single line, and the answer Kundan Mishra built to it.
These five people are not the whole story of Jharkhand’s young innovators. They are examples from a generation that is larger and more active than the state’s reputation suggests. Jharkhand’s startup ecosystem had been criticised including in a Times of India report in January 2024 for having fizzled out after early promise, with entrepreneurs and investors citing poor infrastructure and limited government support. The Jharkhand Startup Policy 2023, launched under the Hemant Soren government, set a target of incubating 1,000 startup ideas by 2028 through the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Innovation Lab portal. The Indian Startup Association met Jharkhand’s Finance Minister Radha Krishna Kishore in 2024 specifically to push for more concrete government support. These are genuine gaps. The ecosystem is real but thin. Funding is hard to find. Infrastructure is limited. Talent leaves. These problems are not invisible to the people starting companies in Jharkhand Manish Piyush described them directly when he talked about why coming back to Ranchi required building an ecosystem from scratch, not just a company.
And yet these five founders from a dairy farm at Ormanjhi, a Court Road office in Ranchi, a small town on the Subarnarekha river, a metaverse platform built out of Mumbai with Jharkhand roots, and a merchandise company in Bokaro represent something that is not adequately captured by the phrase “startup ecosystem.” They represent a generation of young people from Jharkhand who looked at their home state, saw problems that needed solving, and decided that they were the ones to solve them. Some of them came back from bigger cities and bigger salaries. Some of them never left. All of them chose to build where they were from rather than where it would have been easier. That choice, unglamorous, financially uncertain, often lonely is the actual story of young Jharkhand changing itself. Not the policy announcements. Not the incubator programmes. The five people who decided to stay.
SOURCE LOG
Manish Piyush IIM Indore graduate; 14 countries Tata Group 2009-2017; GM Tata Motors Mumbai; Momentum Jharkhand 2017 conference; “people said all the money spent was in vain” quote; quit Rs 1 crore/year job; Aditya Kumar co-founder childhood friend BIT Mesra; both quit corporate jobs; started dairy November 2018 Ormanjhi Ranchi; 5 cows initially; 5 litres to 1,000 litres per day; 1,000 then 1,500 customers within a year; profitable first year; Rs 60/litre milk price; glass bottle delivery; cold chain 4°C; delivery before 9 am; 40 staff home delivery; built own ERP software with AI/IoT/CRM; Rs 3 crore annual turnover; Rs 15 crore valuation; Rs 1.2 crore seed round April 2021 Dhianu Das Alfa Ventures + Agility Venture Partners; expanded Ranchi/Bokaro/Ramgarh/Jamshedpur/Patna; incubated at ABVIL Jharkhand government; protein content 3.6-4% vs branded milk 2.9%; dairy ERP for farmers requiring only thumb press: YourStory, “Startup Bharat: How two friends decided to start a milk revolution,” February 2021, yourstory.com | The Better India, “Shocked by Dairy Malpractices, Jharkhand Duo Build Startup to Deliver Pure Milk,” October 2020, thebetterindia.com | Business Today, “Ranchi-based dairy startup Puresh Daily raises Rs 1.2 cr seed fund,” April 2021, businesstoday.in | 30Stades, “Jharkhand: Tech graduate duo’s dairy venture Puresh tastes success,” September 2020, 30stades.com | MyNation, “Success story: Starting dairy business,” January 2021, mynation.com | ChalGenius, “Puresh milk winning hearts during lockdown,” June 2020, chalgenius.com
Harshit Poddar and Anuvrat Saboo SafEarth Clean Technologies; registered Ranchi Court Road; founded 2017 age 26; RV College of Engineering Bengaluru engineering graduates; both worked at 8Minutes Futures Energy prior; bootstrapped personal savings; SaaS platform connecting solar users/manufacturers/financiers/execution companies; reduces project cost 7-10%, time 40-50%, errors to zero; $427K total external funding Mumbai Angels/Anthill Ventures/Gruhas; annual revenue Rs 6.15 crore FY2024; Rs 100 crore+ net investment facilitated; Toyota/Graphite India/Golcha Associated/CK Birla Group clients; 50,000 tonnes carbon emissions saved per year; 24 employees as of August 2024; offices Ranchi/Bengaluru/Delhi/Jaipur; 50+ solar revenue-generating projects across India; 1% rooftop solar market share in 7 months of operation: YourStory, “This Ranchi startup is making the transition to renewable energy as simple as buying a phone online,” December 2020, yourstory.com | The StartupLab, “How Ranchi-Based Startup SafEarth is Accelerating the World’s Transition to Renewable Energy,” July 2024, thestartuplab.in | Tracxn, “SafEarth 2026 Company Profile,” tracxn.com | Lounge47 / CIO Angel Network profile, lounge47.in | Insights Success, “SafEarth: Fostering a Sustainable Future,” September 2021, insightssuccess.in
Shyam Murmu from Ghatsila East Singhbhum; Galang AR-based cultural tourism model for tribal communities; Rs 30,000 crore India experiential tourism market context; circular economy cultural preservation environmental sustainability local economic empowerment; selected by Ministry of Tribal Affairs for Startup Mahakumbh 2024 Bharat Mandapam New Delhi April 3-5; Dharti Aaba Birsa Munda Tribepreneur Pavilion; 3,000+ startups at event; 40+ tribal-led startups; 8 Jharkhand entrepreneurs representing state; Tribal Design Forum member; three investors expressed informal interest in Galang; several academic institutions keen to collaborate; brochures and bookmarks drew strong interest: Udit Vani, “Jharkhand Innovators Make a Mark at Startup Mahakumbh 2024,” April 10, 2025, uditvani.in
Varsha Mario Kachhap Tribal Design Forum member Jharkhand; Tribalverse metaverse platform tribal art; AR/VR indigenous art purchase; NFT and physical form; selected Ministry of Tribal Affairs Startup Mahakumbh 2024; currently Assistant Project Manager Adivasi Lives Matter Mumbai; designer; work at intersection culture/spatial storytelling/social justice; amplifying indigenous adivasi voices; community-led storytelling/knowledge sovereignty; tribal music project song as memory knowledge resistance; part of Adivasi Lives Matter article on tribal musicians: Udit Vani, “Jharkhand Innovators Make a Mark at Startup Mahakumbh 2024,” April 10, 2025, uditvani.in | Village Square, “Songs of the soil: Tribals preserving culture through sound,” February 2026, villagesquare.in
Kundan Mishra Bokaro; started CustKart June 2020 with brother Abhishek Mishra; customised merchandise t-shirts/caps/hoodies for colleges/corporates/institutes especially small towns; 25+ engineering and medical colleges orders completed; Rs 50 lakh turnover; clients from Nagaland; “clients now from places as far off as Nagaland” direct quote; wanted to work in hometown and create local jobs so people don’t have to leave families: YourStory, “Startup Bharat: Innovation from the hinterland five inspiring stories from Jharkhand,” March 2021, yourstory.com
Times of India January 2024 Jharkhand startup ecosystem fizzled despite initial promise; Indian Startup Association delegation met Finance Minister Radha Krishna Kishore 2024; Ratin Bhadra ISA president quote; Jharkhand Startup Policy 2023 target 1,000 startup ideas by 2028; ABVIL portal from February 4 2024; 158+ startups recognised under Startup India from Jharkhand; Startup Jharkhand IIM Ranchi Startup Conclave 2026 partnership; ROLAS won pitching competition IIM Ranchi Startup Conclave 2026: TICE News, “Jharkhand Startup Policy: Is the State Ready to Become India’s Next Startup Hub?” February 2025, tice.news | Startup Jharkhand official website, startupjharkhand.org
