The ₹16-Crore Company Hiding Inside Your Walls

Ask anyone in Guwahati to name a "successful startup" and you'll hear about apps, fintech, maybe a D2C label. Almost nobody will mention the company quietly turning the region's garbage into double-digit crores — because it makes something nobody finds exciting: bricks.

Zerund Manufacturing began in 2018 as a final-year engineering project at Assam Engineering College. Three students — David Gogoi, Rupam Choudhury and Mousam Talukdar — were told to build something for marks. They built a business instead. Their product: a lightweight brick made from cement, fly ash, organic binders and plastic waste, with up to 70% of its raw material pulled from industrial and plastic refuse.

It sounds like a science-fair gimmick. The numbers say otherwise. In FY22 the company sold roughly ₹2.5 crore of bricks. The next year it grew more than 400%, crossing around ₹10 crore. By March 2025, annual revenue had reached roughly ₹16.8 crore, with monthly sales now north of ₹1 crore. Along the way they've sold over 40 lakh bricks to 2,500-plus clients and recycled more than 1,500 tonnes of plastic and 10,000-plus tonnes of industrial waste.

Here's why it works — and why almost no one noticed. Bricks are boring, and boring is a moat. There's no glamorous launch, no viral moment, no influencer unboxing. Just contractors quietly switching because Zerund's bricks run 15–20% cheaper, are lighter, and are fire-, pest- and earthquake-resistant with better insulation. The product sells on economics, not hype. That's exactly the kind of business that compounds for years without ever trending.

It also solves a problem the Northeast actually has. Guwahati alone generates dozens of tonnes of plastic waste a day; Zerund turns a disposal headache into a building material and sources fly ash from a nearby NTPC plant. The unglamorous supply chain is the point — almost every input is something the region was already throwing away.

The lesson for anyone building in Assam isn't "make bricks." It's that the most durable businesses here often look unsexy from the outside. While the spotlight chases the next app, a company solving a dull, physical, local problem can quietly build real revenue, real recycling impact, and real defensibility — all before the rest of us even learn its name.

So the next time someone says nothing big is being built in Assam, point at a wall.