Deep tech | sewage treatment | infrastructure startup | India | EcoSTP | founder story

What do you do when your apartment's sewage treatment plant overflows and you discover it's just a fake tank dumping raw waste into a lake? For Tharun Kumar — former engineer turned deep-tech founder — that moment became the starting point for EcoSTP, a bacteria-based sewage treatment company now operating across 24 Indian states.

This is not an AI startup. It's not a quick-flip consumer app. It's infrastructure that runs on biology, scales through municipalities, and actually makes money doing it.

Tharun breaks down how he validated the market in a space nobody wanted to touch, built a supply chain from scratch, convinced large institutions to trust a startup with sewage, and how profitable infrastructure gets built when everyone else is chasing exits.

Topics:

- Deep tech that runs on bacteria, not code

- Scaling infrastructure across 24 Indian states

- Why India's sewage problem is a massive business opportunity

- How to build in a sector that gets zero Silicon Valley glamour

- Profitable unit economics in environmental infrastructure

Guest: Tharun Kumar, founder of EcoSTP

Host: Arjun Thomas

Show: Building Real — real conversations with people in the middle of building, without the highlight reel gloss.

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