In an exclusive interview with Indian Startup Times, Rajeev Sinha, CEO and co-founder of Onlygood, explained why he moved from two decades of corporate leadership at PwC, IBM and enterprise consulting to building a sustainability intelligence platform for manufacturers. His conviction was straightforward: sustainability was shifting from a reporting formality into a hard commercial issue for Indian exporters, and he wanted to build the system that solves it, not just advise on it from the outside.
From enterprise consulting to a product-led sustainability platform
Rajeev started his career with PwC and IBM, and later with Keane (now NTT data). For most of two decades he built and ran large enterprise programs, first in SAP-led transformations and consulting, then as a founder with Vanca in sustainable fashion. What he kept seeing, especially with Indian manufacturers, was that access to European buyers, cost of capital and trade competitiveness were increasingly dependent on traceability, carbon and ESG data that most companies simply could not produce reliably. “I did not want to advise on that problem from the outside for another decade,” he mentioned. “I wanted to build the system that solves it. Onlygood came from that conviction, that sustainability intelligence should be practical infrastructure for a manufacturer, not a consulting report that sits in a drawer.”
The ESG and carbon challenges Onlygood was built to address
According to Rajeev, several issues needed direct attention. Reporting was manual and consultant-heavy, making it expensive, slow and hard to trust. Carbon accounting lived in spreadsheets disconnected from real supplier and production data, so the numbers became fragile the moment anyone asked for evidence. The most urgent challenge, he said, was that Indian exporters were walking into new trade rules such as the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and the EU Digital Product Passport with almost no affordable tooling to respond. “That combination, real regulatory pressure with no accessible solution, is the wedge Onlygood was built to serve,” he explained.
The story behind the name Onlygood
When Sinha and his co-founder decided to start the business, one thing was clear from the first weekend: whatever they built had to be a long-term commitment, and it had to stay in sync with their personal philosophy. “For me that philosophy has always been simple, to do good and to build goodness in society,” Sinha said. “So we did not want a name that was merely clever. We wanted a name that said exactly what we stood for. After a long stretch of thinking, we settled on Onlygood.” The identity received the same care as the name. The team ran the whole process through design thinking, and finalising the name and the logo took more than three months. The logo carries three colours blue, green and a warm yellow each working on two levels. On the first level they represent the world: blue for the Earth, green for life and greenery, and warm yellow for the sun as the source of energy. On the second level the colours carry the company’s values: credibility, trust, innovation, and care for people and the future. They are also meant to feel calm and understated, which is how Onlygood wants the brand to come across: serious and quietly confident rather than loud. “So the name and the identity are really one idea,” Sinha said. “Onlygood is not a tagline we added later. It is the philosophy we began with.”
How PwC, IBM and enterprise consulting shaped the platform?
Sinha’s early consulting years taught him how a business works from the inside: how operations run, how supply chains behave, where conflicts arise, and how to manage all of it to create synergy rather than friction. In large enterprise and SAP-led work, he learned quickly that data governance, auditability and clean process design are not optional, because a CFO or an auditor will eventually test every number. “I carried that discipline straight into Onlygood,” he said. “We did not build a reporting tool with a dashboard on top. We built a data platform where every carbon and ESG number can be traced back to its source, because that is exactly what enterprise buyers and assurance providers demand.” We believed in solving complete value chain problems of a company from own baseline, benchmarking to supply chain. We could trace and build a world class system with Sustainability strategy, reduction, Net Zero, CBAM, DPP, LCA, PCF, Ecovadis, CDP and complete system from one source Onlygood Platform.
Bootstrapping first, then a seed round backed by customers and corporations
Onlygood was bootstrapped at the start. The founders and directors put in the initial capital themselves, pooling their own money to create the fund that got the business off the ground. “We did it that way on purpose,” Sinha said. “We wanted to build conviction with our own capital first, prove that the idea worked, and earn some early traction before we asked anyone else to back us.” Once that traction was in place and the team was confident in what they had built, Onlygood went out and raised its seed round. The company began close to home, with friends and family coming in first to carry it through the early stretch. Then it raised a seed round of over half a million dollars. What makes Sinha proud of that round is who backed it: not just financial investors, but a couple of Onlygood’s own customers and a few strong corporations. “When the people who use your product and the companies that know your sector choose to invest, that is the strongest signal you can get,” he said. Alongside the funding, a series of recognitions validated the direction. Maruti Suzuki awarded Onlygood as the best sustainable brand in its Cohort 8. The IIT Madras Incubation Cell recognised it as the most sustainable brand and gave it a winner award in its startup program. Daimler India Commercial Vehicles honoured the company as well. Onlygood also partnered with Maruti, including on its international engagement, and with ISB DLabs, which drives the business school’s innovation work. “These were crucial milestones, because each one came from a serious industrial player testing what we do, not from a marketing exercise,” Sinha noted.
How the funding will be deployed: BRSR, CBAM and CSRD?
The funding is being deployed into three areas. First, the core engine: deepening product carbon footprint capability and the supplier data layer, because that is what everything else stands on. Second, regulatory breadth: extending coverage so one platform can serve BRSR reporting in India, CBAM exposure for exporters, the Digital Product Passport, and CSRD-aligned disclosure for companies inside European value chains. Third, reach: growing the partner network and the go-to-market motion so Onlygood can serve manufacturers without a heavy direct sales cost. “The strategy is India first, then the export corridors that connect Indian manufacturers to European demand,” Sinha said.
How AI transforms ESG, and Onlygood’s competitive edge?
In Sinha’s view, AI moves ESG from an annual, manual, backward-looking report into something continuous and connected to live data. Instead of a team rebuilding a carbon inventory by hand every year, the system pulls from real operational and supplier data, flags gaps and drafts the disclosure. “Our advantage is focus,” he said. “We are not a generic ESG dashboard competing on features. Our defensible position is trade competitiveness for Indian export manufacturers, built specifically around CBAM and the Digital Product Passport. That is a sharper, more urgent problem than broad reporting, and it is one the large horizontal players are not built to serve well.” Onlygood has also built its own Small Language Model (SLM) that stays entirely in-house. It speeds up technology development, powers Myra, the company’s AI assistant, runs peer benchmarking, and has every global sustainability standard built into it, which feeds the “gold standard” of reporting at the core of the platform.
Lessons from sustainable fashion at Vanca, and how technology helps
Before Onlygood, Sinha was a pioneer in retail fashion with Vanca. The brand worked with major platforms such as Jabong, Myntra, Flipkart and Amazon, and did not stop at fast fashion. It also built a carefully curated organic brand that became a benchmark for the industry. Vanca insisted on the right sourcing and built in exchange and take-back so that the loop could actually close. “That is where the real lesson sits,” Sinha said. “Circularity is not a slogan, it is a tracking problem. If you cannot follow a garment through its whole life, you cannot claim it is responsible.” Fashion retail is genuinely complex, more than most people assume. But the basic tenet is simple to state: if you can trace a product from the field to the yarn, to the bales, to the fabric, to the garment, through its usage and all the way to the end of use, then you have built the foundation of a real, responsible business. Everything else the sustainability claims, the circularity, the trust stands on that traceability. “And that is exactly what technology is for,” Sinha said. “What was almost impossible to do by hand across a long and opaque fashion supply chain is precisely what a data platform and a product-level passport now make possible. That thread runs directly from Vanca to Onlygood.”
Long-term vision: making sustainability as normal as accounting
Onlygood is here for the long term, Sinha emphasised. That is not a strategy line; it matches the ethos of the company and of the founders. Their personal philosophies are in sync with what they want to do for their own lives, for the environment and for the wider system. The business and their beliefs point in the same direction. “I want sustainability intelligence to become standard infrastructure for manufacturers, as normal and as trusted as their accounting system,” Sinha said. “If a company can prove its carbon and ESG position as easily as it closes its books, then doing the right thing stops being a burden and becomes a competitive strength.” The first part of the journey is awareness. Onlygood helps a business see clearly where it stands, understand its baseline and know how to improve. What is powerful, Sinha noted, is that improving on sustainability is not separate from improving the business. It leads to better processes, better profitability and efficiency, a stronger supply chain, better value chain partners, more customers and higher quality products. “Do it well, and you get a better operation and a better society at the same time,” he said. The second part is the ecosystem. Onlygood will move into partnerships across assurance, carbon credits and offsets. Its ambition is to operate end to end, building a marketplace and an ecosystem where every partner and every participant thrives, not just the company itself. This belief runs inside the company too. All Onlygood employees are shareholders. They literally own a part of the business, and once that genuine sense of ownership is there, the company grows at a completely different level. “The commitment is stronger, and together we want to build a beautiful ecosystem of business, people and environment,” Sinha said. That is the intersection he cares about: where business growth and environmental responsibility stop pulling against each other. The company’s foundation work through Reset Planet, restoring tree cover and water bodies in the Aravalli belt, sits alongside all of this. The commercial platform and the environmental mission are two expressions of the same idea: that good business and a healthier planet should be in the same direction, not opposite ones.
Why Onlygood matters for Indian manufacturing?
For Indian manufacturers, especially exporters, sustainability is no longer optional. It is becoming a condition for market access, financing and competitiveness. Onlygood’s approach combining traceable data, regulatory coverage and AI-enabled workflows aims to turn ESG from a compliance burden into a strategic capability. Rajeev made clear that Onlygood is not trying to be another ESG dashboard. It is trying to become the infrastructure that allows Indian manufacturers to prove their carbon and ESG position with the same confidence they bring to their financial statements and to use that proof as a source of advantage in global markets.
Interview By : Sejal Thakur
