How Swarup Bose Built Celcius Into India's Largest Cold Chain Platform in Five Years
A lockdown evening, a Canva logo, and two decades of watching food rot. Inside the company solving India's $50 billion cold chain problem.
It was March 2020, and Swarup Bose had nothing to do.
For the first time in 19 years, the cold chain manufacturing factory he ran with his father sat idle. India was locked down. Orders had stopped. The 44-year-old entrepreneur found himself at home with an unusual amount of free time and an old friend named Rajnish.
They started drinking. They started talking. And somewhere around hour four of that evening, they stopped complaining about the lockdown and started sketching a company.
By hour six, they had a name, a business model, and a logo designed on Canva that remains unchanged today. The company they sketched that night, Celcius Logistics Solutions Pvt Ltd, is now approaching INR 500 crore in annual revenue, operates in over 600 Indian cities, and has raised INR 390 crore from investors including French private equity firm Eurazeo.
The company is a COVID baby. Started at the end of 2020, but I’ve been in cold chains for almost 20 years now. So the journey of Celcius started 20 years back when I got into cold chain.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights
The Problem and the Bet
To understand why Celcius exists, you need to understand what happens to a mango between the time it leaves a farm in Maharashtra and the time it reaches a refrigerator in Delhi. The answer, more often than not, is that it rots.
India wastes INR 92,000 crore worth of food every year. About 23% of all perishables spoil before reaching consumers. The country needs 250,000 refrigerated vehicles to move its food, dairy, and pharmaceuticals. It has roughly 80,000.
The cold chain logistics market in India is valued at $40-50 billion. And 75-80% of it operates informally, through phone calls, WhatsApp messages, and personal relationships.
85% is still small guys. Tier two. Tier three. Tier four guys. It’s a very fragmented, unorganised market where 85 to 90% of the entire asset class lies with the unorganised segment.
Swarup had watched this system fail for nearly two decades. His manufacturing business, Reefer India, built the physical infrastructure of cold chain: insulated panels, refrigerated containers, cold storage units. He knew where temperatures deviated, where trucks broke down, where products spoiled because someone left a door open too long.
It is a terrifying sector. Your AC unit shuts down, your products are screwed. Your vehicle breaks down, your products are ruined. Your temperature is not maintained even by plus or minus three, four degrees, your products start rotting.
The investment required to enter cold chain logistics is 2.5 times higher than dry logistics. The failure cost is also 2.5 times higher. Most entrepreneurs looked at those numbers and built warehouses for tires and batteries instead.
When Swarup and Rajnish launched Celcius in August 2020, they made a decision that seemed reckless. They would own nothing. No trucks. No warehouses. Not even, as Swarup puts it, “a cycle.”
Instead, they would build software: a transport management system, a warehouse management system, and an inventory management system, all developed in-house by a 45-person tech team. They would aggregate existing capacity, thousands of small transporters and cold storage operators scattered across India, and stitch them together with IoT devices, protocols, and real-time monitoring.
The tagline they chose was deliberately provocative: “The True Unbroken Cold Chain.”
This tagline was very, very provocative. Very bold. And it was not really something acceptable by the market that you claim to be the true unbroken chain. And obviously we were not at that time, but the vision was always simple.
Today, Celcius manages over 4,000 temperature-controlled vehicles, 150 cold storage facilities, and 250 hyperlocal riders. Every touchpoint uses Celcius apps and devices. The company tracks temperature, humidity, location, and door status in real time across its entire network.
The results: industry transit wastage averages 8%. Celcius maintains 0.4%.
Building the Machine
The challenge with an asset-light model is that you depend on thousands of independent operators who have no particular reason to be loyal to you. Swarup solved this with a program called Vahan Vikas Yojana, a name deliberately chosen to echo government welfare schemes for instant trust in smaller towns.
The program helps small transporters procure refrigerated vehicles and secure commercial loans. In exchange for exclusivity, Celcius guarantees minimum monthly income. The transporters do not worry about finding loads, negotiating rates, or chasing payments.
The economics are compelling. A transporter who puts down INR 5 lakh can expect returns of INR 25 lakh after five years, a 35% annual ROI. The program now has 500 vehicles enrolled with a three-month waiting list. Celcius has never missed a payment.
You give us a product, we make sure the product actually goes in that same shape, size and colour right up to your doorstep. That’s our responsibility.
The other half of the loyalty equation is simpler: Celcius pays on time. The company uses venture capital to fund working capital, ensuring transporters receive payment within 30 days whether or not enterprise clients have paid. In an industry where delayed payments are standard, this reliability functions as a competitive moat.
Celcius’s first month of operations generated INR 8 lakh in revenue from small agents and brokers.
My first month’s turnover was eight lakh rupees. So that also came from maybe 100 orders.
Five years later, the client roster includes Blinkit, Zepto, Zomato, Flipkart, Domino’s, Baskin Robbins, and Doctor Reddy’s. The company handles everything from quick commerce dark store fulfillment to pharmaceutical logistics requiring temperatures down to -80°C for biologics.
For two years, Celcius powered Zomato’s Legends program, shipping Hyderabad biryani to Delhi overnight via air cargo and temperature-controlled bags. When Zomato cancelled the program, Swarup pivoted rather than shut down. The same infrastructure now serves cloud kitchens, cafes, and specialty food manufacturers who want national distribution without physical presence in every city.
Transport accounts for 60% of current revenue, warehousing for 20%, new services like hyperlocal and air cargo for 15%, and pharmaceutical logistics for 5%. Pharma, just five months old as a vertical, is expected to grow fastest.
The Path Forward
The early fundraising was not glamorous.
We begged, borrowed, and we stole. Begged to get money. Borrowed from all the friends. And stole all the savings that we had in our own accounts.
Before institutional investors came calling, Swarup raised from 85 high-net-worth individuals writing checks between INR 1 lakh and INR 10 lakh. He describes those early days as “frozen callings,” spending 12 hours a day pitching anyone who would listen.
We partied hardest when we landed our first one crore check. Landing a 200 crore check, the party was smaller.
In May 2025, during one of the toughest fundraising environments for Indian startups, Celcius raised an oversubscribed INR 250 crore Series B, split between equity and debt. The equity was co-led by Eurazeo, making only their second India investment, and Omnivore, an impact fund focused on food safety. Total capital raised to date: INR 390 crore.
Swarup is explicit about what comes next: an IPO within three years. The company has built what he calls a “future-proof team” of 400 staff and 1,500 on-ground personnel, capable of handling significantly higher volumes. Expansion from 600 to over 1,000 cities is planned by early 2026.
CB Insights recently named Celcius a “Challenger” in global cold chain shipping networks, placing it alongside UPS, Maersk, and FedEx.
What I’m doing monthly here now was my yearly.
Near the end of our conversation, Swarup made a distinction worth noting. He was talking about the difference between entrepreneurs who build businesses and founders who build categories.
Ambition, everyone has. Every office-going person is ambitious enough to create their own company. But are they imaginative enough to imagine that company before it is created?
The cold chain in India was not a market waiting to be disrupted. It was a system waiting to be built. Swarup spent 19 years constructing refrigerated containers before he realized the containers were not the point. The point was what moved through them, and whether it arrived intact.
For the complete conversation, including how Celcius’s algorithms route vehicles to strawberry farms before the season begins, watch the full podcast episode.
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