Anand Pathak, Founder & CEO of FitSol, on building a Decarbonization-as-a-Service company, turning carbon data into measurable business outcomes, and helping Indian manufacturers make sustainability an operational advantage rather than a compliance exercise.

For years, corporate sustainability has largely revolved around measurement. Companies calculated their carbon footprint, prepared ESG reports, tracked emissions and presented dashboards but the harder question remained: What happens next?

That gap between measuring emissions and actually reducing them became the foundation for Fitsol.

Founded in 2022, FitSol is a Decarbonization-as-a-Service (DaaS) company, combining carbon intelligence with execution across logistics, packaging, procurement, waste management and supply chains. The company was born from a simple observation: manufacturers did not necessarily lack awareness about sustainability; they lacked an execution partner capable of translating carbon data into operational change.

Fitsol’s approach revolves around what we call TCO² – Total Cost Optimisation and Total Carbon Optimisation. Rather than treating sustainability and profitability as competing priorities, FitSol attempts to optimise both simultaneously.

For one of our clients we have saved approximately ₹50 lakh annually while avoiding 220 tonnes of CO₂e and reducing breakage from 6% to zero. In another case involving a metals manufacturer, reusable packaging eliminated more than 2.6 lakh virgin boxes annually, reduced packaging costs by 5–7% per box and avoided 84.5 tonnes of CO₂e.

At the heart of the company’s technology stack is Kyoto, FitSol’s AI-powered carbon intelligence platform. Fitsol also works across supplier networks, green logistics, reusable packaging, EPR fulfilment and sustainable material sourcing. According to me, the objective is not simply to identify carbon hotspots but to operate the solutions required to address them.

From Measuring Carbon to Reducing It

What inspired you to build FitSol, and what problem did you feel the market was failing to solve?

When we started FitSol in 2022, every conversation with a manufacturer about sustainability ended the same way — a dashboard, a report, and a number nobody was quite sure how to act on.

The market had built excellent tools for measuring emissions and almost nothing for reducing them. That gap is where FitSol was born.

The problem wasn’t awareness. Indian manufacturers, especially Tier-1 and Tier-2 automotive suppliers, already knew their OEMs and export customers would eventually ask hard questions about Scope 3. What they didn’t have was an execution partner — someone who would walk onto the shop floor, into the logistics fleet, into the packaging line, and actually change how carbon and cost moved through the business.

We built FitSol to be that partner, not another platform sitting on top of the problem.

Making Sustainability a Business Case

Many organisations still view sustainability as a compliance requirement. How is FitSol changing that perception?

We don’t try to argue people out of the compliance mindset – we let the numbers do that.

Every engagement runs on what we call TCO²: Total Cost Optimisation multiplied by Total Carbon Optimisation. We optimise cost and carbon together, because decarbonisation that ignores cost never gets funded past the CFO, and cost-cutting that ignores carbon never gets past the auditor.

In practice, that’s shown up as very concrete outcomes. On one auto-components packaging programme, we saved a client roughly ₹50 lakh a year while avoiding 220 tonnes of CO₂e and taking breakage from 6% down to zero.

For a metals manufacturer, moving to 100% reusable packaging eliminated over 2.6 lakh virgin boxes a year, cut costs by 5–7% per box, and avoided 84.5 tonnes of CO₂e.

Once a plant manager sees packaging costs and breakage rates fall in the same quarter that emissions fall, compliance stops being the reason they’re doing this.

Why FitSol Chose an End-to-End Model

Why was it important to build an end-to-end platform instead of focusing only on carbon measurement?

Because measurement without execution just relocates the problem – you go from not knowing your footprint to knowing it precisely and still being stuck with it. We didn’t want to hand a client a hotspot map and walk away.

That’s why FitSol is built in layers. Kyoto, our AI carbon intelligence platform, measures Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions activity-by-activity – plant, process, machine and supplier – rather than estimating from spend.

GreenAlign takes that into the supplier base at scale, because Scope 3 is fundamentally a supplier-data problem before it’s anything else.

And then we operate the reduction directly: managed EV fleets, reusable packaging systems we’ve patented, EPR fulfilment, and Greenfind, our marketplace for verified recycled and sustainable materials.

If any one of those layers were missing, we’d be another dashboard company.

Tackling the Scope 3 Challenge

What are the most common mistakes companies make while trying to decarbonise their supply chains?

Honestly, the biggest one is companies treating decarbonisation as a reporting exercise instead of an operating one. They collect data, file a nice BRSR or CDP report, and nothing in procurement or logistics actually changes. The disclosure becomes the finish line, when it should be the starting point.

The second mistake is chasing Scope 3 too early. Everyone wants that big number — because that’s where 70-80% of emissions usually sit — but if your own Scope 1 and 2 data isn’t clean, your Scope 3 estimate is just guesswork on top of guesswork. It doesn’t hold up when a customer or investor actually asks you to defend it.

And the third is supplier engagement — or the lack of it. Companies send out a spreadsheet and expect accurate carbon data back, especially from SME suppliers who have neither the tooling nor the incentive to give it to them. Without training, without shared benefit, without making it easy — you get poor data, and poor data means poor decisions downstream.

If I had to boil it down: most decarbonisation programmes fail not because the ambition is wrong, but because the execution stays symbolic. The companies that actually move the needle are the ones that tie carbon performance into real operating decisions — sourcing, routing, packaging, vendor contracts — not just the sustainability report.”

AI Beyond the Dashboard

How is FitSol leveraging AI and emerging technologies?

AI is baked into how we execute, not just how we report. Our carbon intelligence platform, Kyoto, doesn’t just tally emissions – it’s activity-based, pulling from real fuel, utility, and BOM data across Scope 1, 2, and 3, and it ranks the small handful of hotspots actually driving the footprint. So instead of handing a client a 200-page report, we tell them the seven things to fix first.

The more interesting piece is on the packaging side. We’ve filed two patents – one is a simulation engine that jointly optimises 3D packaging design, container load configuration, and lifecycle emissions in a single pass. It gives you three ranked options: lowest resource use, lowest emissions, or the best trade-off between the two. That’s AI doing real engineering work, not just analytics – packaging gets engineered, not specified.

The second patent is on the tracking side – BLE-based asset tracking with fault-tolerant fallback, so returnable packaging assets never drop off the ledger, even when a scan gets missed somewhere in the supply chain.

And then on the supplier side, our platform GreenAlign automates the data collection and validation across a supplier base – tracking 62 ESG parameters per supplier – which is normally the most manual, painful part of Scope 3 reporting. We’ve done that at scale for a Tier-1 automotive client, baselining 500+ suppliers on one framework.

So the way I’d frame it: we’re not using AI to make dashboards prettier. We’re using it to compress the distance between measuring a problem and fixing it – which is really the whole thesis behind Fitsol being an execution partner, not another sustainability platform.

Finding Product-Market Fit

How did you balance environmental impact with commercial viability in the early days?

Early on, we made a deliberate choice not to sell “sustainability” — we sold cost and risk reduction that happened to also reduce carbon.

That reframing was the whole game. A plant head doesn’t have a budget line for “carbon”; he has one for logistics cost, packaging damage and vendor risk. TCO² came directly out of learning that lesson the hard way in our first few client conversations.

The biggest challenge was trust, not interest.

Demonstrating Impact at Scale

Could you share a customer success story that demonstrates FitSol’s environmental and financial impact?

One of our clearest examples is with a leading manufacturing enterprise where we built out structured GHG accounting across Scope 1, 2 and 3.

We brought 120-plus suppliers onto a single reporting backbone and allocated emissions at the product level rather than averaging by spend, which is what let the client actually act on the data rather than just disclose it.

At a portfolio level, across all our engagements, FitSol has now managed more than 22,00,000 tonnes of CO₂e cumulatively.

What I’m proudest of isn’t the size of that number — it’s that it’s built from activity-level, verifiable data, not modelled estimates.

The Role of ClimateTech in India’s Industrial Transition

What role can startups like FitSol play in helping India achieve its climate goals?

I think startups have a role that large corporates and government policy genuinely can’t fill on their own and it comes down to speed and specificity.

India’s climate goals – net-zero by 2070, the BRSR and EPR mandates, the push toward SBTi-aligned targets – those are policy-level commitments. But they get met or missed at the level of individual factories, individual supplier relationships, individual truck routes. That’s execution-level detail, and it moves too fast and too granularly for big compliance frameworks to handle alone. That’s where startups come in – we operate in that gap between what the regulation demands and what actually happens on the ground.

Take Scope 3, for instance. Over 70% of most manufacturers’ emissions sit with their suppliers – and the vast majority of those suppliers are SMEs with no sustainability team, no budget, no bandwidth. A government mandate can require that data be disclosed. It can’t actually go and collect it, validate it, and hand it back in a usable form. A startup can – because we can build the tooling, the automated follow-ups, the supplier engagement muscle that makes compliance actually achievable instead of aspirational.

The second piece is that startups can move cost and carbon together, instead of treating them as a trade-off. Big transitions – EV fleets, returnable packaging, recycled materials – only scale in India if they’re economically rational for the business making them. A startup that’s obsessive about unit economics, not just emissions numbers, is what turns a climate mandate into something a CFO signs off on without a fight.

So I’d say: policy sets the destination, but startups build the roads. And in India specifically – with a supplier base that’s this fragmented, this diverse, and this deeply SME-heavy – you need companies who are willing to get into the operational weeds: logistics, packaging, supplier onboarding, one factory at a time. That’s not glamorous work, but it’s the only way the national numbers actually move.”

Building a Defensible ClimateTech Advantage

With competition increasing in carbon management and ESG, what differentiates FitSol?

Most of the competitive set stops at the dashboard. They’ll tell you your footprint, sometimes very well, and then hand you back the problem of what to do about it.

FitSol’s differentiation is that we operate the answer — managed EV fleets, patented packaging systems, verified sourcing through Greenfind and EPR fulfilment.

That execution layer is genuinely hard to replicate quickly; it requires operational infrastructure, not just software.

Our plan to hold that advantage is to keep compounding depth in the areas we already operate rather than spreading thin.

Every engagement we run generates activity-level data that makes the next reduction lever sharper — the packaging catalogue, the fleet routing models and the supplier ESG scoring all get better with scale.

That’s a harder moat to copy than a feature list.

Leadership Built on Verified Numbers

What has been your biggest leadership lesson while scaling FitSol?

“The biggest leadership lesson for me has been that having the right vision isn’t the hard part – getting a growing team to carry that vision without you in the room is.

When it’s just you and a handful of people, alignment is automatic. You’re making every call together, so there’s no gap between what you believe and what the team does. The moment you start scaling – bringing in people across finance, engineering, operations, sales – that automatic alignment disappears. Suddenly you have brilliant people making good decisions in isolation that don’t add up to the same direction, simply because they never had the context you were carrying in your head.

I learned that the hard way. Early on, I thought if I just hired sharp people, gave them ownership, and stayed out of their way, things would compound. And ownership matters  but ownership without shared context just produces fragmentation. What actually changed things was realising that alignment isn’t a one-time conversation you have when someone joins. It’s something you have to keep re-establishing in how you talk about the roadmap, how you make trade-offs visible, how often you explain not just what we’re doing but why, so people can make the same call you would even when you’re not there to make it.

The other half of that lesson is on the team-building side: the people who scale a company well aren’t necessarily the most talented individually; they’re the ones who can hold the vision and translate it into their own function without watering it down. That’s a rarer skill than raw talent, and I’ve learned to hire and promote for it deliberately, not assume it comes bundled with competence.

If I had to compress it: vision is easy to have. Vision that survives contact with fifty people who weren’t in the founding conversation that’s the actual leadership work.”

Creating an Operator-Led Culture

How do you foster innovation while keeping the organisation focused on execution?

Honestly, most of what looks like innovation at Fitsol didn’t start as an innovation project – it started as a client problem we couldn’t solve with what already existed. Our packaging design engine came out of a real conversation about fitting more parts into fewer trucks. So the discipline isn’t ‘innovate, then find a use for it’ – it’s ‘solve the sharpest real problem in front of you, and let the innovation emerge from that.’ That naturally keeps you execution-anchored, because you’re never innovating in the abstract.”.

Building the Infrastructure for the Next Generation of Manufacturing

What is your long-term vision for FitSol?

The way I think about it, the honest answer is that I want Fitsol to be infrastructure, not a vendor. When India’s manufacturing base thinks about how it hits its climate commitments – net-zero targets, SBTi implementation, EPR at scale – I want the answer to run through systems we built, not through one-off consulting engagements that don’t outlast the contract. That’s a bigger, slower thing to build than a product roadmap. But if we do it right, decarbonisation in Indian manufacturing doesn’t happen despite the constraints of cost and complexity – it happens because someone built the operating layer that made it economically obvious to do.”

Interview By: Arushi Agarwal