The cold, the calculated & the competent - why we invested in Celcius?
How Celcius is stitching together India’s fragmented cold chain to unlock the future of agrifood and healthcare logistics.
India and other developing markets have witnessed a striking rebound in agrifoodtech investment over the past year. While collaborating with AgFunder on Developing Markets AgriFoodTech Investment Report 2025, we documented a 63% year‑on‑year jump in funding - rising to $3.7 billion - even as global venture flows cooled. Notably, upstream solutions (farm‑gate marketplaces, fintech for smallholders) grew by 22% - reflecting the need for tech optimisation in fragmented parts of the value chain.
To sustain this growth, a vital piece on the backend needs to evolve - India’s Cold Chain Infrastructure. This is an infrastructure responsible for the storage & movement of temperature-sensitive goods like fresh produce, milk, ice creams, and even pharmaceuticals, like vaccines.
Take an ice cream for example. If somewhere along the value chain, it happens to melt - it will be refrozen and delivered to the last mile. Now, that might be acceptable for ice cream, but what about meat? Can we afford to take the same risk? Refreezing meat after a temperature breach can make it a breeding ground for dangerous pathogens. A vaccine that dips below its threshold loses potency. A few degrees lost in transit can create huge accessibility barriers to perishables.
In 2022, a study by the Ministry of Food Processing Industries put numbers to some losses: nearly 47% of India’s perishable crops suffer post-harvest losses. In pharma, up to 40% wastage in vaccines alone. Most of this comes down to temperature breaches, mishandling, and long delays in an infrastructure network that was never designed to speak to itself.
When we first started looking into this space, it wasn’t clear whether a startup could, or even should, try to solve the challenge.
Then, we met Celcius.
Currently working with marquee brands as their clientele, Celcius is an end-to-end third‑party logistics (3PL) startup. They take on responsibility for temperature‑controlled transport and storage - managing bookings, handling compliance paperwork, and even troubleshooting on‑the‑ground hiccups.
This managed‑services model is critical in emerging markets like quick commerce and healthcare delivery; where clients often lack the in‑house expertise or bandwidth to manage complex cold‑chain flows themselves.
By combining their tech platform with dedicated operational teams, Celcius ensures accountability all the way through the last mile.
The cold: A Systems Lens on a Legacy Problem
From the outset, Celcius approached the problem not as a logistics failure, but as a systems challenge.
On the supply side, 98% of India’s cold chain is run by small operators who own most of their trucks and warehouses. With aging assets & minimal technology: temperature breaches and high spoilage are common, cutting into profits across the board.
On the demand side, seasonal and uneven demand, low aggregation, client concentration risk, and delayed payments limit growth. Infrastructure is often near production hubs, causing empty return trips and high costs.
What Celcius saw was an ecosystem with highly-capable assets that can be unified on a common network.
Their platform today connects:
4,000+ reefer vehicles
107 cold storage facilities
350+ cities across India
And importantly, they’ve done this without owning trucks or warehouses. Their asset-light, tech-first approach aggregates what’s already on the ground - and makes it work better.
The Calculated: Retrofitting technology for newer use cases
Whether it’s a vaccine shipment in transit or a fresh meat delivery for a QSR chain, stakeholders working with Celcius have the ability to track temperature, monitor delays, and intervene before spoilage happens.
Celcius has found product-market fit across diverse segments - fresh produce, pharmaceuticals, quick commerce, frozen food, dairy, meat, and fisheries. Each vertical has its own quirks, regulatory demands, and logistical complexity. The tech-enabled personalisation for each step in the storage & transport journey has earned Celcius multi‑year commitments from marquee clients to sustain healthy unit economics as they scale city by city.
The Competent: Surviving Long Enough to Fix It
Cold chain is not a business where you pivot fast and break things. The margins are tight, the consequences of error are high, and the sector runs on reliability more than disruption.
Swarup Bose, Celcius’ founder, came into this space with that understanding. He’d worked in the industry, and returned not just with conviction but with specificity - knowing exactly where the cold chain was breaking and what needed to be stitched together.
With a leadership team spanning logistics operations, IoT engineering, and regulatory compliance, the early traction of their tech & supply chain management has been validated in the form of adoption by some of India’s most critical and hyperfast delivery startups.
Agrifoodtech in developing markets is at an inflection point: upstream digital tools are maturing, capital is flowing again, and consumers demand higher standards. Parallel to that, healthcare & life sciences systems are scaling up - but all of it risks hitting a wall without a dependable cold‑chain backbone.
As these sectors wake up to the digital future they deserve, we believe Celcius will be one of the platforms helping hold it together. With them, we’re placing a bet on that long game.
And we’ll be watching closely.