How Tessol generates heat to keep things cool

When Mumbai-based KisanKonnect Safe Food Pvt Ltd, a firm that deals in fresh agri produce, was looking for an appropriate solution for last mile deliveries for its dairy, fruits and vegetables, it turned to Tessol for its specially designed freezers. “With Tessol’s support we could manage our milk and milk products, which are highly temperature sensitive, without any complaints and quality issues. After seeing the success in our dairy division our confidence increased so much so that we designed our entire supply chain of cold-pressed fresh fruit juices, which are preservative free, around Tessol,” says Vishal Astunkar, Director.

Far away from Mumbai, in Nigeria, Aisha Bashir, founder and CEO of Cam Dairy, also uses Tessol’s cold chain trucks and specialised cold boxes to transport dairy products from many pastoral communities to the markets where there is demand, helping local incomes while keeping products fresh. International Finance Corporation’s TechEmerge programme has connected Cam to Tessol for the cooling solutions. As Bashir points out in a youtube video, Tessol’s cold chain uses no electricity or fossil fuels when produce is being transported and has reduced running costs for it. Like KissanKonnect and Cam Dairy, many large food makers ranging from Mondelez and Reliance Retail to Swiggy and Licious, among others, are using the Tessol technology to move their food brands.

So, what’s unique about Tessol, an acronym for Thermal Energy Service Solutions? Explains Rajat Gupta, founder & CEO, “Instead of using diesel, we have an electric cooling system which uses thermal storage and it reduces overall operating cost by about 60 per cent. It’s completely clean, so from a sustainability standpoint, it’s good and very attractive from a return on investment perspective.”

Tessol truck

Core tech

The core of Tessol’s tech is what it calls Phase Change Material (PCM), which is an engineered chemical developed by the firm, which has specific freezing and melting points and can be stored for a long time. The proprietary thermal storage technology, which is 100 per cent fuel-free and environment-friendly, can be customised to volumes ranging from five litres (a last-mile delivery bag) to 10 tonnes (a 20 feet full-size truck), guaranteeing consistency and continuity of the cold chain. The phase change chemical-based thermal technology uses modular components similar to rechargeable batteries to store and release energy in a controlled manner. Once the PCM material is frozen, an internal heat exchanger enables regular melting of the PCM to maintain a certain temperature range in the system. Different goods to transport will need appropriate PCMs depending on the temperature needed.

Depending on what’s being transported, from ice creams and chocolates to meats and vegetables the phase change materials can be charged accordingly to store for over 10 hours, or even up to 24 hours and more, in a temperature range of minus 25 deg C to plus 25 deg C. As Niranjana Neelakantan, the co-founder and COO of Tessol, explains, “We were the pioneers in this space of offering sustainable solutions in refrigeration and we compete with some large companies. The chemicals we use are completely non-toxic, water soluble and they go into varying kinds of HDPE encapsulations and the cartridges are installed in a box or a small vehicle depending on the use. For a large truck the PCM goes into stainless steel containers.”

Gupta, who graduated from IIT Delhi, founded the company in the early part of the last decade. After working with Robert Bosch in Hyderabad, where he was dealing with new technology deployments in Europe and in India, Gupta later quit to study at Harvard and on his return was keen to start something on his own. It was in Hyderabad, the life and work partners met, where Niranjana was working with Dr Reddy’s.

“The space that I was most passionate about was clean tech and it was very nascent at that point in India, and even in the US it was just a buzzword,” he recalls. Neelakantan, who has an electronics degree from Cochin Institute of Science & Technology and a business management degree from Symbiosis, first handled the HR function for Tessol before taking on the role of COO.

Zeroing in on thermal storage

The husband-wife duo moved to Ahmedabad and joined Infuse Ventures, an early-stage clean tech fund in IIMA. “I was leading an accelerator which had multiple programmes. I identified that energy storage was an area where we needed expertise. When we were evaluating various technologies, we thought that energy storage in the thermal form presented a lot of opportunity in the refrigeration industry,” recalls Gupta.

Creating a business plan which looked at applications of thermal storage in the cooling space, after around 10 months, both moved to Mumbai to set up Tessol in 2013. Kicking off a bootstrapped venture, Tessol had investments from friends, family and an angel investor and later Infuse Ventures itself gave seed funding of half a million dollars.

Large players in the refrigerated trucks business such as Carrier, ThermoKing, Ice Make, are established in the conventional refrigerated cooling space, which need continuous power for a cold room or diesel use for a truck. As Gupta explains, an eight feet truck can use up to 1,800 litres of diesel and over ₹1 lakh in costs over a year. The Tessol tech, he says, can save up to 1,000 litres of diesel usage for standard running of a truck.

“We were the first players who facilitated the last mile e-commerce when Covid hit (with boxes using the PCM capsules). There has been competition, but there is no one in India currently offering the entire range of solutions. Now we have cold rooms, refrigerated vehicles, we have mid-mile movement and last mile solutions as well. We call ourselves the Amazon for cold chain!” says Neelakantan with a grin.

Wireless solution

Tessol’s factory and corporate office is in Navi Mumbai in a sprawling 15,000 square feet unit. Pan-India, all ecommerce players are large customers from Amazon and Reliance to Swiggy and Zomato and ice cream and chocolate majors such as Vadilal, Mondelez, Nestle and Hershey’s. Tessol has recently innovated a wireless solution which enables remote monitoring of products on the move. Pharma companies are also using Tessol to transport drugs and the new area that it’s looking at is data centres which require enormous amounts of water and power to cool.

As the founders explain, the company has come a long way from the time they had to explain the technology to users. Having established itself as a player to reckon with in the cooling solutions space, Tessol expects to scale up rapidly. Now profitable, in FY 26, Tessol expects turnover to double to ₹36 crore. Four investors are on board. Infuse Ventures, the first, has partly exited; Ankur Capital, a Mumbai-based impact fund has invested in Tessol and so has an angel fund, 1Crowd. Mela Ventures too has invested ₹7.5 crore in the company. Tessol doesn’t expect to raise more funding for now. In the coming years, Tessol expects to generate a lot of heat to cool things down.