Startup PadCare Bagged A Joint Deal From Four Sharks On Shark Tank India 

Ajinkya, age 8, asked his mother Rekha Dhariya about what a sanitary napkin was after watching a television advertisement in the small Maharashtrian village of Mhasla. The young man then founded PadCare Labs, a startup that creates environmentally friendly sanitary disposal methods. PadCare secured a joint offer from four sharks on the business reality series Shark Tank India Season 2, receiving 1 crore for 4% equity.

Sharks that invested in the startup included Namita Thapar (executive director, Emcure Pharmaceuticals), Peyush Bansal (co-founder, CEO Lenskart), Vineeta Singh (co-founder, CEO of Sugar Cosmetics), and Anupam Mittal (co-founder of Shaadi.com).

“One sanitary napkin takes 500 to 800 years to decompose and 98% of sanitary napkins go into landfills and water bodies. They are also burnt at 800 degrees with a process called incineration, producing hazardous waste, toxic smell and smoke,”  according to 26-year-old Ajinkya Dhariya on Shark Tank India.

Earlier, while Dhariya was an R&D engineer for ISRO, he visited a landfill in Pune and observed rag pickers collecting diapers and sanitary trash with their bare hands. This is how health technology company PadCare came to be.

“A woman spends 5 days a month and approximately five to six years of her life experiencing a menstrual cycle. She consumes over 7,500 sanitary napkins in a lifetime. Our rag pickers pick these up with their bare hands. But in embarrassment, in villages, these are either buried or burned. 1,200 crore sanitary napkins are used every year in India,” According to Dhariya, who is also the CEO of PadCare, 

In order to resolve this, Padcare provides three products: the PadCare bin, which safely and odorlessly keeps hazardous waste for 30 days, the PadCare X, which turns 15,000 sanitary napkins into wood pulp and high-quality plastics, and the PadCare Vend (a sanitary napkin vending machine). According to the founder, the Padcare bin is also India's first patented sanitary napkin disposal and recycling system.

“The wood pulp and plastic are sold in the market to paper and packaging industries. These can be converted into creating a PadCare bin as well,”  he continued.