“I usually gave my old clothes to my house help or put them in dry waste, but I never really knew what happened after that. There was no reliable way to dispose of them responsibly,” says Suruchi Athalye, a Bengaluru resident living in a high-rise community.

It is a problem sitting inside almost every urban home, rarely spoken about but constantly unfolding in the background. Wardrobes expand and shrink with changing seasons, occasions, and impulse purchases, but the journey of clothing rarely ends with intention or clarity. 

Clothes are handed over informally, stored away for years, or discarded into mixed waste streams, where their fate becomes invisible. What follows is rarely tracked or questioned. In that invisibility lies a growing urban challenge that is often overlooked. 

Textile waste is one of the most under-recognised environmental issues in Indian cities, not because it is small, but because it is hidden behind everyday convenience and the assumption that someone else will handle it.

It was this gap between intention and outcome that brought together Prasad Lingawar and Nachiket, two engineers who would go on to build ‘NoKasa’ in Bengaluru, a system designed to bring structure, accountability, and dignity to how clothes are discarded and reused.

A shared instinct takes shape

The duo first met as hostel mates at VIT Pune, where their friendship began long before any idea of building a company together. Over the years, their careers took very different directions. 

Prasad built QuodeIt, a coding assessment startup that was later acquired within a year and a half, and went on to work across multiple growth roles, including leading revenue expansion at Dyte, a Y Combinator-backed company. 

Nachiket built a deep technical foundation in semiconductor systems and chip design, working at Qualcomm and Tenstorrent before moving into AI compute chip initiatives at Meta.

Despite these different worlds, the intent to build something together never faded.

“We had always spoken about building something together,” says Prasad. “We were just waiting for a problem that felt worth committing ourselves to.”

That search for a meaningful problem eventually brought them to Bengaluru in December 2023, where the first version of NoKasa began to develop. However, it had nothing to do with textiles at that point.

Before clothes came into the picture

The duo did not start out thinking about textile waste at all. It came from a more casual curiosity about how people behave in everyday life, especially how small incentives can change habits. While observing how quick-commerce platforms were influencing user behaviour through rewards, they began wondering if something similar could make waste disposal feel simpler and more natural, rather than something people postpone or avoid.

Their initial concept of the platform revolved around allowing people to hand over scrap and receive digital rewards instead of cash, which could then be used across consumer platforms. The aim was to make disposal feel less like a chore and more like an integrated digital action within daily life.

“We thought waste could be integrated into the digital economy through incentives,” he explains to The Better India.

To validate this direction, they spent time speaking with companies such as Swiggy, Zomato, and BigBasket, while also trying to understand how waste actually moved through Bengaluru’s informal and formal networks. What they realised was not a structured system, but a........

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