Climate Champion: Sucheta Anchaliya, Founder, RAYEVA
In early 2024, Sucheta Anchaliya kept noticing the same thing everywhere she looked: shampoo bottles, hotel amenity kits, personal care packaging, used for minutes and left behind for years. An investment banker who had spent her career advising companies on IPOs and valuation, she wasn't looking for a startup idea. She just wanted the plastic to stop.
The Fix That Wasn't One
Her first instinct was simple: bring paper bottles to India as a plastic alternative. She started researching suppliers, and the idea fell apart fast. Paper bottles sold in India were mostly imported from China, priced for a market that wasn't price sensitive, and India's consumers very much were. A one-product fix wasn't going to work here.
So she asked a bigger question: what is the actual gap in sustainable consumption that could be solved at scale, not just papered over with one substitute product. That question sat with her through the rest of 2024, unresolved.
The Decision Nobody Asked Her to Make
By early 2025, Sucheta had stopped looking for a product and started mapping a system. She spent months researching sourcing, supplier fragmentation, pricing, verification, and corporate procurement before she tried to sell anything. What she found: sustainable alternatives already existed. The problem was that finding them, verifying they were genuinely sustainable, locating a reliable supplier, and getting them at the right price and scale were four separate, unsolved problems. That research reframed the idea entirely, from one paper bottle to an end-to-end platform. That platform became RAYEVA.
What She Actually Did
Through the first months of 2025, Sucheta strategized before she pitched a single brand. She and her team built a landing page that communicated RAYEVA's ethos, but no functioning marketplace existed yet. Later in 2025, she started approaching sustainable brands directly, and got rejected. Founders were understandably reluctant to partner on an idea alone, without a working platform behind it. Instead of softening the pitch, she used the rejections to sharpen it, forcing herself to define exactly what value RAYEVA needed to create for both brands and buyers before asking anyone to sign on.
That sharpened pitch is now 30+ sustainable brands onboarded, entirely pre-revenue spanning food and beverages, home essentials, personal care, gifting, and eco-friendly lifestyle products.
The Proof, Before a Single Rupee of Revenue
RAYEVA has partnered with Beco, Bonvie, Zero Circle, Kadam Haat, Ecokaari, Kheoni, and Impact Water, and opened discussions with hospitality, wellness, restaurant and cafe, corporate gifting, and workspace operators to shift their procurement toward sustainable sourcing. None of this came with a sales team closing deals against revenue targets. It came from a founder who got told no, and went back to fix the pitch instead of the product.
"Sustainable alternatives exist. Finding, verifying, sourcing and pricing them are four separate problems."
Sucheta Anchaliya, Founder, RAYEVA
Do This Before Your Next Purchase
Sucheta's first move wasn't building a company, it was changing her own shopping cart. She swapped single-use plastics for compostable garbage bags, non-toxic personal care, compostable sanitary products, and bamboo tissues, and started segregating her waste properly. The part that mattered: she didn't stop after one purchase. She made the better alternative her default, every month, not a one-time swap.
Pick one repeat purchase this week and replace it the same way. Then do it again next month.
Know Someone Making This Call?
If someone in your circle is quietly rebuilding how their business sources, packages, or ships, tag them. RAYEVA started with one person refusing to accept that sustainable sourcing had to stay this hard. Who's doing that around you?
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