Sanskrit has a way of compressing an entire philosophy into a single word, and परिणाम, pronounced parinama, means outcome. It is not a metaphor chosen for a pitch deck. It is closer to an operating instruction, and the two founders who built a company around it have spent their careers learning, the hard way, how rarely good intentions in climate finance actually arrive at one.
Guneet Banga, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, and Rajiv P. Kapahi, Co-Founder and Group Chief Operating Officer, did not set out to build another climate fund. They set out to fix a gap they had both watched swallow good technology whole: the space between a pilot that works in a lab and a business that survives in the market.
A Frustration Shared, A Company Founded
Every company has an origin story, but not every origin story is really about a problem. Parinama Group’s is. Founded in 2024, the firm emerged from a conviction its two founders had reached separately, from opposite sides of the table: too much promising climate science was dying quietly in the gap between demonstration and deployment.
Guneet’s route to that conviction ran through Citi, where he executed capital-markets transactions for Indian corporations and learned something that would shape everything that followed: India operates by its own rhythm and logic, not as a smaller version of Western markets. Later, as both a General Partner and a Limited Partner at Aera VC, he watched the journey from insight to enduring company up close and understood how fragile that journey really was.
“In India, the gaps were structural,” Guneet says, “inconsistent policy signals and almost no patient capital in the US$1 million to US$10 million band where hardware-intensive climate companies need it most. Yet India is the world’s most demanding deployment laboratory: prove a cost-effective green technology here, and you can scale it almost anywhere.”
Rajiv’s route ran through the other side of the table. A Fellow Chartered Accountant with more than three & a half decades as CFO / CXO / Board Member and operating headship at companies including Gillette, Dell, Max Healthcare, DLF Pramerica (JV of Prudential-USA) and Boston Scientific, he spent his career as the person who had to make a strategy survive contact with a balance sheet, an auditor and a board. “I have sat through too many investment committees where the thesis was beautiful, and the working capital was an afterthought,” he says. “Climate hardware in India does not forgive that.”
The two arrived at the same gap from opposite directions. “Rajiv sees a company not just strategically but granularly, the way an auditor and an operator see it, at the same time,” Guneet says. “I had spent years looking at how capital moves. He had spent years being accountable for whether the money actually did what the deck said it would. Parinama needed both, and neither of us could have built it alone.”
That shared insight became the blueprint. The firm closes the gap through three divisions: Venture Builder, Strategic Advisory and Partnership, and Ecosystem Builder. “The promise is in the name,” Guneet says. Rajiv’s gloss is drier: “An outcome is what is left after the accounting is done.”
Mission Built on a Refusal
Ask the founders what Parinama believes, and the answer arrives not as a slogan but as a rejection of one of climate finance’s most persistent assumptions. The firm’s mission is to turn India’s climate innovations into globally scalable solutions, connecting capital, technology, and communities to generate both returns and measurable impact.
Three values sit underneath that mission. The first is the refusal itself: a rejection of what the founders consider the most damaging assumption in climate finance today, that profit and planet are somehow in tension. The second is dual accountability: every investment must clear both a financial bar and a measurable impact test, and, notably, each has veto rights over the other. Neither is allowed to quietly outrank the other when a deal gets difficult. The third is a preference for systems over point solutions: building not merely a fund but the connective tissue that allows one proven answer to travel from a single market to a hundred.
The veto design, Guneet is quick to note, was Rajiv’s insistence. “I would have been content with a scorecard,” he says. “Rajiv’s view was that a scorecard is what you produce for your investors; a veto is what you produce for yourself.” Rajiv shrugs off the credit. “Thirty-five years of month-end closes teaches you that anything without a hard stop gets negotiated away by the third quarter.”
Three Divisions, One Flywheel
Parinama’s three divisions are not siloed services. They are designed, deliberately, to function as a flywheel, and it is Rajiv, who runs the firm’s operations, who describes how the loop turns.
The Venture Builder operates in what the firm calls the first-of-a-kind valley, the stretch of a hardware company’s life where support is most needed, and capital is least available. The Strategic Advisory and Partnership arm guides established foreign companies with proven climate technology into India, walking them through Environmental Technology Verification (ETV) and, often, investing alongside them as a long-term partner rather than a one-time adviser. The Ecosystem Builder, which Parinama helped found and which now operates through the India Climate Investment Collaborative (ICIC) and the Indian Climate Innovation, Investment and Technology Ecosystem (ICIITE), convenes public, private, philanthropic and community actors across eight sectoral working groups. ICIC is a national, independent body in which Parinama is one founding member among several; the division of labour, as the founders put it, is that ICIC governs and funds, while ICIITE builds and scales.
“Each arm feeds the next,” Rajiv explains. “Advisory brings proven technology into the country. The Venture Builder carries it through the valley where most of it dies, if it doesn’t sync up with the local environment. The ecosystem work creates the demand, the verification and the policy pull that make the next company’s journey shorter than the last one’s. Take any one of the three away and the other two become a consultancy and a fund, and India already has plenty of both.”
Taken together, the three divisions attack what conventional capital tends to avoid: the early-stage funding gap, the missing verification infrastructure, and the silos that keep innovation, capital and policy moving in parallel instead of in concert.
Why India Comes First
There is a temptation, in global climate investing, to treat India as one market among many. Parinama’s founders reject that framing outright. India is the starting point, Guneet argues, precisely because the scale of its need, the price sensitivity of its customers and the depth of its engineering talent mean that anything proven there has already survived constraints most markets never impose.
“India,” Guneet says, “is the source code for South-South climate deployment.”
It is a striking claim, and also a strategic one. A technology built to Indian unit economics and Indian complexity is, by definition, a technology built for almost anywhere else.
The Five Filters
Before any company enters Parinama’s pipeline, it must clear five distinct filters. It must be critical to India’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) pathway. It must be capital-efficient at Indian unit economics. It must be scalable to more than 100 sites within five years. It must be exportable to Global South peers without redesign. And it must be additive to the ecosystem rather than merely competitive within it.
Every deal that survives those five filters then faces the firm’s dual test: the financial-return bar and the measurable impact metric, each carrying veto power over the other. This is what prevents two failure modes at once: the quiet drift into impact-washing on one side, and the quiet abandonment of mission the moment a deal becomes commercially attractive on the other. What sets the firm’s model apart, in the end, is not the number of filters. “It is the insistence on unit economics that survive scale,” Rajiv says. “Filters are cheap. Surviving your own growth is not.”
Affordability as Architecture, Not an Add-On
Ask most climate investors about affordability, and they will describe it as a social good layered on top of a business model. Parinama describes it as the business model itself. Indian customers, the founders point out, buy on operating economics, not on green premiums. A solution that only works with a subsidy will never scale, no matter how elegant its engineering.
That belief has been converted into hard thresholds. Every portfolio company must demonstrate an Affordability Index of 1.0 or below and a Levelised Cost of Carbon Abatement of no more than US$50 per tonne of CO₂. These are described, deliberately, as preconditions rather than aspirations.
The firm extends this same rigour to the communities it serves, refusing to describe them as beneficiaries. Instead, they are named the fourth P in Parinama’s architecture, alongside Public, Private and Philanthropic: People. The founders argue that People confer the social legitimacy without which no climate infrastructure can endure. And where impact and returns appear to be in tension, the firm treats that tension as a failure of measurement, not an inevitable trade-off, a belief embedded in what it calls its Impact-NAV framework, under which a meaningful share of the partners’ own economics is tied to verified emissions reductions.
Outcomes, Verified
For a company still young, Parinama’s early markers are specific rather than sweeping. In April 2026, its investment in Aspire Impact became a working demonstration of the venture-builder model: a new Chief Executive was installed, the advisory board was strengthened, and the company was brought to a post-funding valuation of ₹360 million.
Aspire was also the first test of how the two founders work together under pressure. Guneet led the thesis and the board conversation; Rajiv ran the diligence on the numbers and the governance reset. “We disagreed on the sequencing for about a week,” Rajiv says. “He wanted the Chief Executive in place first. I wanted the board settled first. He was right, and I told him so.” Guneet’s version is shorter: “He made me prove it. That is the job.”
At the ecosystem level, ICIC has assembled something that did not previously exist in India: an investor-led climate governance table bringing family offices, development finance institutions, sovereign anchors, ministries and civil society into a single room.
“We measure ourselves not by capital deployed but by outcomes verified,” says Rajiv. “The platform we are building, the ICIC governance table, the ICIITE delivery engine, the blended-finance structures, is designed to be the infrastructure that the transition actually needs, not just the capital that is easiest to move.”
The Road to 2031
The founders’ ambitions for the years ahead are laid out with the same precision as everything that came before. Their stated aim is that by 2031 Parinama will have proved that a full-stack climate platform can deliver superior financial returns and superior climate outcomes simultaneously. The vehicle for the first half of that claim is a proposed Category II Alternative Investment Fund (AIF), currently being framed, to be registered with the Securities and Exchange Board of India, targeting US$150 million for deployment across more than 20 companies in the US$1 million to US$10 million band. The advisory practice aims to have structured India’s entry point for more than US$500 million of inbound climate capital. And ICIITE is expected to have carried two to three first-of-a-kind projects all the way to bankability.
Ownership of those targets is split the way the firm is. Guneet holds the investment thesis, the fund and the investor relationships; Rajiv holds the operating plan, the structuring and the governance that institutional partners will diligence. “He is accountable for whether we are right,” Rajiv says. “I am accountable for whether we are still standing when it is time to find out.”
Beyond India, the founders’ vision is explicit South-South deployment, with the same intellectual property and blended-finance templates being built for the Indian market designed, from the outset, to travel.
A Closing Argument
If there is a single thesis running underneath everything the founders have built, it is this: the climate conversation spends too much time waiting for the next breakthrough technology and the next visionary founder, when most of the technologies needed to bend the curve by 2030 already exist. What is missing is not invention. It is catalytic capital, coordination and pathways that allow proven climate solutions to scale across markets. “Invention without orchestration is theatre,” Guneet says. “Orchestration without invention is bureaucracy. We built Parinama to supply both.”
The founders describe the outcome ahead in stark, binary terms: either it is solved together, or the consequences are faced together. Parinama, as they frame it, is built as a convening platform, one whose invitation remains open.
“If I’ve learned anything, it’s that teams beat heroes,” Guneet says. Rajiv, asked what he has learned in two years of building alongside him, pauses. “That the thesis was right. And that it still needed someone to make it survive a quarter.”
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