Timeline
- EducationTakes a degree in mechanical engineering from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, and later management training at IIM Ahmedabad and Harvard Business School.Recorded in his company leadership profile.^[2]
- ThermaxSpends 14 years at Thermax, the Pune energy and environment engineering company, in sales leadership roles across industrial heating, distributed generation and engineering services in India, Asia and the United States.He describes Thermax as his formative training.^[2]
- Triple PointJoins Triple Point Technology, an American software company for energy trading and risk management, leads its Asian business and helps set up its India development centre.The move that took him from engineering into software.^[2]
- KonecranesServes as managing director and chief executive of Konecranes and Demag in India, leading the South Asian business of the Finnish-German lifting equipment group and sitting on its global strategy team for mid-segment products.Listed among his previous roles.^[2]
- PennarBecomes president and chief executive of Pennar Industries, where he leads the processed steel company's diversification into engineering products.His last large company role before founding BiofuelCircle.^[2]
- Board and industry workServes as an independent director of Praj Industries, an advisor to kPoint Technologies and IndiaOPD, and chairman of the CII Pune zonal council for 2010-11. He later heads the sustainable feedstock sub-committee of CII's national bioenergy committee.The bioenergy committee role connects directly to BiofuelCircle.^[2]
- 2020Founds BiofuelCircle in Pune in June with Ashwin Save, as a digital marketplace for biomass.The founding date is given by both the company and Bharat Fast.^[1]^[4]
- 2022The company reports working with a dozen farmer producer organisations and more than 1,500 farmers, with about 25,000 tonnes of biomass traded since a pilot in Maharashtra in 2021.The figures come from an interview with The Better India.^[3]
- 2026BiofuelCircle raises Rs 35 crore in a Series B round led by Pooja Unichem LLP at a valuation of about Rs 638 crore.Reported by Bharat Fast in July 2026.^[1]
Who Suhas Baxi is
Suhas Baxi is an Indian energy and manufacturing executive who spent more than three decades running businesses before founding a startup. He is the co-founder, chief executive and chairman of BiofuelCircle, a Pune company that operates an online marketplace for agricultural residue, connecting farmers and rural aggregators with industries that burn biomass instead of coal.[1][2]
The company is a late career move rather than an early one. Baxi had already led Thermax's sales operations in three regions, run an American software company's Asian business, and served as chief executive of Konecranes and Demag in India and of Pennar Industries before he started BiofuelCircle in June 2020 with Ashwin Save.[2]
His public profile is that of an operator rather than a founder celebrity. He gives interviews about biomass supply chains, sits on industry committees and speaks in the language of unit economics and logistics. There is no published date of birth, no family detail and no personal social media presence cited in the sources used for this entry.[1][2]
VNIT Nagpur, IIM Ahmedabad and Harvard
Baxi is a mechanical engineer from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology in Nagpur, one of the older engineering schools in central India. He later took management training at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and at Harvard Business School, according to his company profile. The combination, an engineering base with formal management training, is the standard equipment of an Indian industrial executive of his generation.[2]
The profile does not say when he took each qualification or whether the Harvard programme was a degree or an executive course, and neither point has been established from another source. What the record does show is a career spent at the intersection of heavy engineering and software, which is an unusual pairing in Indian manufacturing.[2]
He describes himself as a sports enthusiast who runs, plays badminton and plays golf. It is a small detail, but it is the only personal information he publishes about himself, and it fits the picture of a chief executive who has spent four decades in organisations with long sales cycles.[2]
Fourteen years at Thermax
Thermax was where Baxi learned the business. The Pune company builds energy and environment equipment, from industrial boilers to waste heat recovery systems, and sells to the same process industries that BiofuelCircle now supplies with biomass. He spent 14 years there in sales leadership roles in India, Asia and the United States, across industrial heating, distributed generation and engineering services.[2]
The significance of that period is the customer list. A company that sells boilers and energy equipment to factories, mills and process plants knows which buyers burn fuel, what they pay for it, and what makes them switch. Twenty years later, BiofuelCircle sells to the same category of buyer, with biomass pellets replacing coal.[2][3]
Baxi calls Thermax his initial grooming and learning. It is the kind of phrase an executive uses about the company that taught him how to sell capital equipment, and it explains why BiofuelCircle talks about supply chains and logistics rather than about being a technology platform.[2]
Triple Point and the software detour
The software chapter came next. Baxi joined Triple Point Technology, an American company that builds software for energy trading and risk management, led its Asian business and helped establish its India development centre. For an engineer from the equipment side of the energy industry, it was a move into the systems that sit above the physical trade.[2]
That experience is visible in how BiofuelCircle is built. The company is not a broker with a website. It runs a platform with direct deals, bidding and digital auctions, and it offers financing and digital settlement to platform participants. Those are the features of a trading system, not a classifieds page.[2][4]
Baxi has said his interest is in the role of data and digital technology in conventional businesses. Triple Point is where that interest became a job, and BiofuelCircle is where it became a company.[2]
Konecranes, Pennar and the top job
Before BiofuelCircle, Baxi was managing director and chief executive of Konecranes and Demag in India. Konecranes is a Finnish group that makes lifting equipment for industry and ports, and Baxi led its South Asian business and sat on the global strategy team that developed its mid-segment products. It was his first full country leadership role.[2]
He then became president and chief executive of Pennar Industries, a Hyderabad company in processed steel, where he led its diversification into engineering products. The move took him from a multinational subsidiary into an Indian listed company, which is a different kind of accountability: quarterly results, a board, and a promoter family.[2]
Those two roles explain the shape of BiofuelCircle's leadership. A founder who has run a multinational's India business and an Indian manufacturer knows how to build a sales organisation, how to manage a board and how to talk to industrial customers. What he had not done before 2020 was start a company.[2]
Boards, CII and the biomass policy work
Baxi's board and industry work runs alongside his executive career. He was an independent director on the board of Praj Industries, a Pune company that builds ethanol and bioenergy plants, and a member of the board of advisors at kPoint Technologies, a video platform. He also advises IndiaOPD, a company working on the digitisation of the doctor and patient interface.[2]
His industry body work is concentrated in energy. He was chairman of the Confederation of Indian Industry's Pune zonal council in 2010-11, and he is a member of CII's national bioenergy committee, where he heads the sustainable feedstock sub-committee. That sub-committee is directly relevant to BiofuelCircle's business, because feedstock supply is the constraint on every biomass buyer in India.[2]
The Praj board seat is the most telling of these roles. Praj builds the plants that turn biomass into ethanol and compressed biogas, which makes it a natural customer or partner for a company that aggregates the feedstock. Baxi's knowledge of that value chain predates his startup by years.[2]
Founding BiofuelCircle in 2020
BiofuelCircle was founded in Pune in June 2020 by Baxi and Ashwin Save. The company is registered under the Startup India programme. Its premise is that India wastes a very large amount of agricultural residue every year while importing fuel, and that the missing piece is not demand but a reliable supply chain between the farm and the factory.[1][4]
The company's own numbers make the case. It says around 235 million tonnes of agricultural residue goes to waste in India annually, that this residue could meet 17 per cent of the country's energy needs, and that more than 70 per cent of it is burnt or wasted because rural sources are fragmented, the economic incentive to collect it is low, supply is seasonal and storage is expensive.[4]
Baxi's answer is aggregation through farmer producer organisations. The company helps farmers form FPOs, which collect residue from member farms, bring it to a central point and run a briquette plant that compresses it for transport. Loose biomass roughly doubles in value once it becomes a briquette, which is what makes the collection economics work.[3]
How the marketplace works
The platform allows buyers and sellers to trade biomass through direct deals, bidding and digital auctions. It also runs Biomass Banks, which are storage centres where crop residue is collected before it is supplied to industry, and it offers procurement, sales and supply chain services to companies that do not want to buy directly.[1][4]
Logistics is the part Baxi talks about most. The company uses trucks with moving floors that can unload 30 tonnes of biomass briquettes in about five minutes, a job that would take manual labour over six hours. That single piece of equipment can cut the delivered cost of biomass by more than half, because transport is the largest cost between a farm and a factory.[3]
The company has also built tools for rural users. A WhatsApp chatbot supports five languages, and a field testing tool is being developed to check biomass quality quickly without manual inspection. These are not glamorous products, but they are the difference between a platform that farmers can use and one they cannot.[1]
The numbers behind the business
Bharat Fast reported that BiofuelCircle had processed deals involving around 1.2 million tonnes of biomass, completed deliveries of more than 600,000 tonnes and generated a gross merchandise value of around Rs 520 crore. The platform had 1,710 registered users, including 354 buyers and 1,356 sellers, and direct connections with nearly 160,000 farmers.[1]
Revenue rose 68 per cent to Rs 51.8 crore in the 2024-25 financial year from Rs 30.8 crore the year before. Product sales contributed Rs 36.8 crore, services such as platform fees and commissions added Rs 12.7 crore, and the rest came from other activities. Total expenses rose from Rs 38 crore to Rs 57.2 crore, so the company spent Rs 1.16 to earn every rupee of revenue, against Rs 1.31 in the previous year.[1]
The loss figure is disputed. Bharat Fast noted that some reports put the 2024-25 loss at about Rs 4 crore and others at Rs 6.51 crore. The company has raised around $20.5 million in equity across its rounds, along with debt. In 2022 it reported working with a dozen FPOs and more than 1,500 farmers, which shows how much the network has grown since.[1][3]
The Series B and the expansion plan
In July 2026 BiofuelCircle raised Rs 35 crore in a fresh Series B round at a valuation of around Rs 638 crore. The round was led by Pooja Unichem LLP, with participation from Varanium Venture, Rajeev Kumar and Karma Capital Advisors. The money is earmarked for the rural network, the digital platform and the biomass supply chain across India.[1]
The company operates in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. It plans to increase its company-owned warehouses from 15 to 35, each able to store up to 10,000 tonnes of biomass, and to grow its franchise network from about 20 locations to 500 by 2028. It also aims to connect one million farmers and capture 10 to 20 per cent of India's biomass market.[1]
The farmer economics are central to the pitch. According to the company, a farmer can earn around Rs 8,000 to Rs 12,000 a year by selling five to nine tonnes of agricultural waste, and more than 1,000 local aggregation partners, many of them tractor owners, can earn between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 10 lakh a year collecting and transporting it. Ashwin Save told The Better India that a farmer with about two acres can add Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000 a year, which he described as enough to keep two children in school.[1][3]
What has not been confirmed
No date of birth, age, birthplace, family detail or marital status for Suhas Baxi has been published in the sources used for this entry. The 36 year career figure is his company's description of his experience, not a dated employment record, and the years he spent at Thermax, Triple Point, Konecranes and Pennar are not given.[1][2]
The funding history is only partly public. The total of about $20.5 million in equity is reported by Bharat Fast, but the individual rounds before the 2026 Series B are not set out. The valuation of about Rs 638 crore is the figure reported for the latest round and has not been confirmed by the company.[1]
The loss for the 2024-25 financial year is reported differently by different outlets, at about Rs 4 crore and at Rs 6.51 crore, and this entry records both rather than choosing. The company's claims about farmer numbers, tonnage and gross merchandise value are its own. The 2028 targets, including 500 franchise locations and one million farmers, are plans and not results.[1][3][4]
Questions about this entry
Who is Suhas Baxi?
Suhas Baxi is the co-founder, chief executive and chairman of BiofuelCircle, a Pune company that runs an online marketplace for agricultural residue and connects farmers and rural aggregators with industrial buyers of bi.
What is Suhas Baxi known for?
Suhas Baxi is the co-founder, chief executive and chairman of BiofuelCircle, a Pune company that runs an online marketplace for agricultural residue and connects farmers and rural aggregators with industrial buyers of biomass.
When was Suhas Baxi born?
Suhas Baxi was born in Not publicly confirmed.
How current is this entry?
It was last updated on 9 November 2026, carries 1 revisions and cites 4 sources. The entry has been checked by the editorial team and carries the verified badge.