FOUNDERS
Everything Was Gone. He Started Again: The story of Gravita
The bank sold his family home.
His business had collapsed. Then a second one did too. And in the end, Rajat Agrawal was declared bankrupt.
Years later, he would run a company generating nearly ₹4,000 crore a year.
This is how he got there.
The Boy Who Wanted to Build
Rajat was still in college when he made his first big ask. He wanted ₹1 lakh from his parents to buy agricultural land.
They said yes.
Farming came first. Then dairy. Then manufacturing. He kept moving, kept trying things, kept looking for the one idea that would stick.
Then he found it in lead recycling.
In 1992, in Jaipur, Gravita was born.
When the Ground Shifted
For a while, it worked.
Then the government changed its regulations, and the economics of his recycling operations quietly stopped adding up. The business he had built was suddenly one he couldn’t sustain.
His first company collapsed.
Most people would have stopped there. Rajat didn’t. He launched another recycling venture.
It failed too.
The Lowest Point
Rajat was declared bankrupt. The bank sold his family home to recover its dues. More than 100 employees had already lost their jobs during the earlier shutdown.
For most people, this is where the entrepreneurial story ends.
A Quiet Restart, Far from Home
Rajat moved to Singapore and took a job with a company in the scrap industry.
No big launch. No grand comeback plan. Just a man going to work.
But he never stopped watching for the next opening. And eventually, he found one: a battery-recycling business in Sri Lanka.
This time, he did something different. He brought in strategic investors to solve the problem that had broken him before: working capital.
The business became profitable.
One Country at a Time
In 2005, he expanded into Ethiopia. Other African markets followed.
Then Rajat came home. He returned to India and rebuilt his presence through new facilities and acquisitions.
In 2010, Gravita went public, raising ₹45 crore through its IPO. The issue was reportedly subscribed around 43 times.
And the company kept growing, expanding beyond lead into aluminium, plastics and other recycling businesses.
Where It Stands Now
The man who lost his business and his family home now leads a company with:
Nearly ₹4,000 crore in consolidated revenue in FY25
₹312.9 crore in net profit in FY25
Rajat Agrawal’s path wasn’t a climb. It was a cycle of building, losing and building again. He didn’t avoid failure. He just refused to let it be the last chapter.
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