Praan – Clean Air for All

I’m a 21-year-old electrical engineer, born and brought up in Mumbai, India. A graduate from Georgia Tech’s Class of 2020, I have been passionate about solving difficult problems ever since I dropped out of school in 9th grade and Dr. Ramesh Raskar gave me the opportunity to work with the MIT Media Lab at the age of 14. I learned that the world around us was simply built by other people, and so were the problems. Hence, much as we would solve maths problems in school, we could solve problems in healthcare, software, transportation, education, and my favorite – climate. Having been born with Asthma, breathing difficulties were no stranger to me. Moreover, realizing that it would take 30 years to see a transition to electric vehicles and clean energy around the world, I chose to start Praan in 2017 and tackle the air borne particulate matter problem in cities.

Air Quality is one of the leading problems of death around the world killing 7 million people annually. Since there are fundamentally “infinite” sources of particulate matter in ambient air, converting to an all-electric mode of transportation and clean energy would only solve some part of that problem and achieving this feat globally would take at least 30 years- in which dense cities would choke up due to particulate matter in ambient air. At Praan we build truly filterless, scalable, weatherproof, outdoor air purification solutions which capture particulate matter from ambient air through their deployment as a network of devices. These are placed on school/university campuses, corporate campuses, hospitals, factories, ports, residential complexes, and hopefully on city streets. Each site of deployment can help over 1500 people breathe healthier air at a cost lower than $0.035 per person per day! At scale it could help over 3 Billion people.

Particulate matter in ambient air contributes to air pollution which is related to significant health challenges. These toxic particulates are generated from automobile emissions, energy production, construction, factories, ports, as well as other natural sources like agriculture and forest fires. While it may be possible to reduce some of these sources over 30 years, such as switching to electric vehicles and clean energy, the other sources are unavoidable. According to the WHO, air pollution is correlated to Dementia, Alzheimer’s, Respiratory Problems, Sleep Apnea, Pre-natal problems, Cardiac Diseases, Early child death, traffic accidents, and more. It kills over 7 million people annually of which 2 million are in India alone.  While most people rely on governments to solve these problems, consumer behavior and globally technological and industrial progress are the only tools which can expedite solving this problem before policy does. While most start-ups and companies have been focused on using sensors or satellite imaging to collect data and carry out analysis using AI, the only way to solve this problem is to use physics implemented through hardware, to capture these particulates from ambient air. Capturing at the source of pollution is impossible due to “infinite” sources. 

Praan’s filterless air purification towers are deployed as a network, to capture particulate matter from ambient air at corporate campuses, schools, university campuses, hospitals, individual homes, apartment complexes, factories, parks, etc. These devices can be placed on the floor using a stand, mounted on sides of building walls, or attached to streetlamps. The non-governmental approach allows faster deployment of these systems, and allows people to decide for themselves what health actions they which to invest in. Each tower filters 240 cubic feet of air per minute by drawing in polluted air using a fan, depositing equal and opposite charges on the air-borne particulates repeatedly, and by allowing the now clumped oppositely charged particulates to become heavy and settle in a collection chamber. The cleaner air is allowed to rise with fewer particulates and exit the device. The inbuilt sensors within the device not only collected air quality and environmental information, but also help the device adapt to changing temperature, humidity, and pollution levels. All the data from the devices is logged for general air quality information and further analysed using machine learning to help devices conserve power by learning when to best switch on and off based on air quality.

Praan helps people in cities in Southeast Asia, Europe, North America, as well as Central and South America to breathe clean air outdoors. Through our interviews with over 2000 people from Mexico City, Los Angeles, London, Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, and Gangnam City we learned about how people viewed the air pollution problem. Most people thought it would take government action with technology as well as policy, while simultaneously acknowledging that they have more trust in non-governmental organisations to solve the problem. They also viewed clean air outdoors as a utility-like service and said that our upfront payment model of $2000/unit was too expensive for them to acquire these devices as a network. Further, they didn’t trust indoor air purification solutions since they believed that as soon as they left their home or office, they would be exposed to the same polluted air outdoors. Hence, using this feedback we derived a model which would allow the largest adoption of these devices to help people in cities privatise clean air at a cost affordable to all. We discounted the base payment by 75% and brought down the cost of breathing clean air per person per day to below $0.023.

Growing up in India, I saw a strong contrast in the health and safety of people across an income gap. I thought it was unfair to expose people with low incomes to the highest levels of toxicity in the air simply because they couldn’t afford to do anything about it. Hence, I named my project Praan – which means stream of life in Hindi. Further, I chose to make these devices as affordable as possible so that we could elevate people by educating them and by further allowing these tools to support people who were otherwise left behind. 

I was a speaker at TEDxGateway in 2013 when I met Daan Roosgarde – someone who came up on the same stage to tell the world that he would capture air pollution and convert the captured Carbon into diamonds. I was awe-struck. He went on to tell me during dinner that he had no intention to install these devices in India and that it would cost $100,000 per unit to deploy these ionic towers with HEPA filters added to them. Further, he hid from the world that these devices were not suitable to solve the problem. Someone with asthma like me, was beyond disheartened to hear that. Hence, I started researching on this problem myself and started to build solutions which could be put on people’s terraces. Later the idea evolved into a 20ft tower which could be installed on streets. However, CNN loved this approach and named me “Tomorrow’s Hero” after shooting a video with me at my lab at Georgia Tech. Over the past 3 years, 115 students from Georgia Tech, MIT, Stanford, CMU, etc have joined my design and engineering efforts to make this dream a reality.

While I was studying in the United States, I realised that I could work hard, get a good job, and build a life for myself here. However, that life would mean leaving behind my family in India permanently, since it would be unfair to ask them to leave their entire world behind for me. While the new life would bring them to a healthier environment, it would take everything else away. Hence on a deeper personal level, I wanted to spend my time making the world around them, safer for them. One big aspect of this was to reduce their exposure to air pollution as they went about their daily lives – in a manner that wouldn’t involve them wearing masks, or spending a lot of money. But along with making their lives better, I hoped to also make the lives better of the people whom they care about, those who worked for them, whom they worked for, their friends, network, everyone. Hence the tagline of Praan – Clean Air for All.

I grew up as someone who loved building things with his hands I started taking things apart in 2nd grade and for the most part managed to put them back together. I grew up as a maker, started to compete in engineering competitions in grade 6 building robots and solar powered boats. I would crave DIY kits like the ones sold by adafruit so when I learnt how to find electronic components, I made my own kits and sold to my classmates in 7th grade – the first thing I sold was a wired AUX speaker kit. I was the first person in India to build a desktop 3D printer at home in 2012, when Makerbot was first released in the US. None of those parts were available in India till many years later, so I had to use whatever I could find. And one I built one that somewhat worked, I taught students at engineering colleges how to build and use them. I was 13 years old. The year after that, I dropped out of school in grade 9 after being the highest scoring student in the school. Soon after I started working with the MIT Media Lab’s India initiative under Dr. Ramesh Raskar. I even got to present on MIT’s behalf to industrialist Ratan Tata, and our late ex-president Dr. APJ Kalam. Today, I’m an electrical engineer from Georgia Tech with a background in engineering, startups, and frugal innovation.

When I started Praan, Georgia Tech told me that if they funded this project they would have to own the IP since they were a state school and they couldn’t fund ideas which became a startup. So I was left on my own and put everything out of pocket. As time went on, I was juggling the rigorous electrical engineering course load, while leading a team full time, and renting apartments in Atlanta to work out of, since I couldn’t do it on school campus. Further, since I was an international student on F1 visa, I couldn’t raise external capital to fund this as a company. So over the past 3 years I gave up internships at Facebook, Harvard Medical, and Tesla, and spent over $85k from my own pockets, parents, and friends to fund Praan to where it has reached – legally, sacrificing on myself, and yet building the best solution to address this problem to date. Moreover, I did it while taking on 18 credits in school (including summer school), and doing a side job with a company called Artis to be able to pay for Praan.

When I started Praan, I was all alone for over a year. Once the CNN article got attention, more people wanted to join the mission. However, all these people were students and were doing many other activities along with their schoolwork. As time went on, I was the only factor driving deadlines, when there was no reward other than impact at the end of it. To compensate people for their time, I used my network to get them internship interviews with companies like Apple and Tesla. In fact, more than 8 people at Praan have worked at each of those firms. Over time, Praan’s team went from 32 people, to 64 people, back to 2 people over the summer in India, back to 26 people, then 5 people, and back to 42 people. In these times, we’ve kept up our pace, improved the quality of our work, demonstrated abilities, and created opportunities for the dream. All of this without anyone getting paid. The bridge that helped keep people motivated was for them to be reminded of the dream, for me to work alongside them not just lead them, and for me to help them in their personal and professional lives.

I have not registered a company since I was an F1 student in the USA and graduated in May. We were to raise a round of funding of $1.35M in March of 2020 just before Covid-19 hit and our entire deal fell apart. With that deal, we would be a singapore based company. With whatever funds we get, we are open to being a US, UK, or Singapore headquartered company, with a subsidiary in India for manufacturing. 

All existing solutions have used either HEPA filters or Photocatalytic oxidation solve the air pollution problem outdoors. Neither of these approaches are scalable because a HEPA filter would need to be replaced every hour if installed in a city like New Delhi, and photocatalytic oxidation based systems have been known to generate titanium oxide particles in ambient air – making it toxic. The technique of Corona breakdown as used by a start-up called Graviky Labs breaks down the air leading to ozone generation, another toxic gas at scale. Moreover, all of these companies and projects believed that a single tower per location would be able to solve the particulate matter problem – a dubious claim.

At Praan we realized that for our devices to create impact they would have to be ultra-low-cost, scaleable, easy to manufacture, filter-less, weatherproof, and intelligent. Moreover, they would have to deployed as a network at site for them to extract particulates from the air at a higher rate than they are being introduced. Hence, we used a volume method to carry out these calculations as opposed to an “area” or “range” of device technique. Further, each of these devices provide air quality and environmental data in a more meaningful manner than ever seen before – in a way that a layman can understand the risks, not just with AQI or PM value numbers. We also use signal processing and neural networks on audio data to learn about the birds and insect species around each device. 

In developing countries, there is a significant lack of public knowledge and understanding about air pollution and it's impact on human life. Most people believe that they’ve lived with it throughout their lives and can continue to do so – simply because they cannot see individual particulates which they are inhaling every second. Hence, we had to take a multi-prong approach to solve this problem. First through awareness creation by people whom the general audience knows and trusts – actors and influencers. To get access to these people, the we found a mentor in Dhruv Chitgopekar, the COO of KWAN, India’s largest talent management company which is responsible for all Bollywood movies. Hence, this would help educate people about the problem and our unique technological solution to it. Further, we made our device’s collection chamber transparent to allow people to visually see what we’ve prevented them from breathing. Along with that, our phone app with our own AI bot – EDITH (Inspired by marvel movies) gives unique insights to customers which have psychological impact. Hence, in the short term we are focused on improving the quality of air around people by making it healthier, and also educating people about the world around them. Over time, we hope to accomplish many areas within cities and around factories which would have healthier air than some of the areas without our devices.

Over time, we hope to see people make conscious decisions about their lives such as which parts of the city to live in, how to understand their emissions and environmental impact, and to prioritise these factors as they make decisions about conducting outreach programs, about spending their weekends on community service – the service they could be doing is helping uplift the people who live in dangerous, toxic environments. If we are able to achieve this mindset change with unaware, uneducated people, while solving the problems ourselves by doubling our device deployments in every country year on year, we would have a net positive impact on the physical and psychological health of over a billion people in less than five years.  

Our prototypes currently serve 185 people in the singular building that they are installed in. 

If funded, by end of this year we would have done 5 projects with an average of 1500 people at each site, so we would impact 7500 people, which in one year would be a lower average of 150000 people with 10 projects in our first year. 

We aspire to double the number in our second year of deployment to 30,000 people and double them year on year. Hence, by end of 5 years we would have impacted a minimum of 2,32,500 people. This is with conservative growth rates. If we succeed in finding the right partners and resources, we hope to impact  a minimum of 1 million people in 5 years. These are just the people on the campuses we are installing these devices. But since the air is free to flow, we are indirectly also improving city-wide ambient air quality.

Along with a business plan to help scale deployment of our existing technologies, the Praan hardware and software stack allows us to build larger systems to not only capture particulate matter from ambient air but also add modules for urban CO2 removal. We hope to solve the air quality issue using a multi-altitude approach: Solve at 15ft height where people walk and breathe, solve at 30ft height to reduce convection of particles, and solve at 300 ft to clear the skies - capturing CO2 in cities will help drive down city temperatures. 

Moreover, Praan has had a bio-engineering team working on 2 major problems

1. Using Phytoremediation in cities to create carbon sinks using tiles built with select species of Moss: This would help create large CO2 and particulate matter capture systems where it is not possible to plant a large number of trees - such as Manhattan, New Delhi, Mumbai, etc. 

2. Using ecosystem design: Privatization of forest creation and ownership by using free land which was previously used for mining, to rebuild forests using Miyawaki method, but also ensuring that the fast forestation techniques are regional, sustainable, and allow for ecosystems to flourish, not just plants to grow. 

All of Praan hardware, software, and bio-engineering projects will be retrofit with sensors connected to the internet allowing us to best monitor the environments at these projects, while finding meaningful ways to communicate this information to the common person. 

Up until now, I studied in a state school (Georgia Tech), present in the United States on F1 visa. Hence, neither could the school finance any of these initiatives nor could I register a company and raise capital over the past 3 years. 

Now that I have graduated, we need to spend our time solving the problems and implementing the solutions as opposed to spend 6-8 months simply trying to convince VCs to give us the money to do this. Hence we would deeply appreciate being connected to Impact investors, angels, or philanthropists who can back this mission.

Since we have not had access to any external capital and I have bootstrapped everything, we could never have a full-time team working on this until I graduated and raised money. Hence, every 4 months when we on boarded new people and some of the old people left, we had to start over from the beginning with these new people losing at least 1 month of time on training and catching them up to speed. Along with this time lost in putting out forms, conducting interviews and on-boarding people.

Lastly, since we are IP sensitive, we would need some capital to file 7 additional patents before we can start publicly talking about our work later this year to excite more HNIs, more investors, and most importantly, more customers to acquire our solutions and believe in our vision. It's only through deployment and positive word of mouth that we can make our impact. 

Since capital is the largest barrier preventing all of the other activities including IP filing, on boarding a full-time team, and beginning early sales, we are focused on getting access to grant money or investor money to back this up. Since investor market has been rather sour, we can progress for the next 6 months with a $500K grant, or raise $1.5M in seed funding to last us for 18 months - in which we will start generating revenue and traction, while filing our IP and having a full-time team within 6 months.

Our mentors use their time and organisations to help us at no cost. Two such prominent organisations are KWAN Talent Management Agency in India, and BMGI (USA and India) to help us with strategy as well as intellectual property filing. 

KWAN: https://kwanent.in/

BMGI: https://www.bmgindia.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=118&It

We are partnering with Carbon Craft Design in India to re-utilize captured pollution from Industry to make tiles, as well as to use some of that material within our devices where we need to add weight and cut costs - like the stand in our outdoor air purification device. 

We are entering the market with our smallest outdoor air purification systems which can be installed at a breathing level: to tackle the problem up to 15 feet in height. 

We have two models for this based on the client:

Model 1: Pay $2000/unit + $50/unit installation cost upfront, and  $10/unit monthly maintenance cost. 

Model 2: Pay $500/unit upfront + $50/unit installation cost upfront, $22/unit monthly rental cost + $10/unit monthly maintenance cost. 

Majority of the people we've spoken to prefer the second model since it gives them a 75% discount on the upfront cost of the device, and helps us increase the number of devices deployed + increase the impact created. With an average of 50 devices per site of install, and an average of 1500 people per site, the cost of breathing clean air per person per day comes down to: 

Monthly cost: ($22 * 50) + ($10 *50) = $1600

Daily cost: $1600/30 = $53.33

Daily cost per person: $53.33/1500 = $0.0355

Our cost of manufacturing per unit after the fund raise is around $300. Hence even with the rental model, we are cash flow positive from day 1. The prices mentioned above are for deployment in India since our labor costs are low. As we expand into western markets, the monthly rental fee may increase to match our costs. In long term, we hope to partner with organisation like CBRE, JLL, Gensler to automate the deployment process for our devices on campuses globally.

Since we are expecting to raise a seed round of $1.5M to last us 18 months, our quarterly cost is $333K. Each install site will use an average of 50 units, resulting in $102K in revenue per site, hence we need to do 4 projects per quarter to be cash flow positive - with the upfront payment model. This is the model we advise to large corporations or factories which are in remote locations (such as the ones we've been talking to) since we cannot provide service to these remote locations yet.

We hope that with partnerships and mentor ship from organisations like MIT Solve, as well as using the story telling efforts with partnership with KWAN and other evangelists, we will be able to deliver more than 4 projects per quarter at an increasing rate to make our desired impact as well as be cash-flow positive by selling to factories, corporate campuses, hospitals, private schools and universities, residential complexes, solar farms, etc. 

In March of 2020, Praan was about to close a seed round of financing of $1.35M to last us 15 months (Leaving out investor names to protect identity) but to due COVID-19 affecting a large number of start-ups, investors chose to protect their capital to save existing portfolio companies, hence we lost our financing. 

We are seeking one of 2 things:

(1) A grant of $500K for the next 6 months to help us reduce cost of devices, file IP, and begin early sales

(2) A seed investment of $1.5M to last us the next 18 months, carry out 15-20 projects, file additional IP, have a full-time team, and create visibility and generate traction.

To last us rest of 2020:$500K since we are a hardware + software startup. This would be $5M if done in the United States, hence we have temporarily moved back to India. 

As it may be evident through all the answers, for Praan to succeed we need to have 

(1) The right partners to finance our work

(2) Increased partnerships with organisations passionate about making the impact 

(3) Tremendous media visibility for our vision, product, story and success, much like Tesla, for people to invest in the technology as a service

(4) Excellent support form the right mentors to help make this dream a reality - for them to share their experience of changing the world to guide us and help us in doing the same ourselves. 

At Praan we have learned there's infinite learning hidden everywhere, hence we need to be hungry and chase these learnings as we move forward. 

We hope to partner with mentors and financers like Gates Foundation, or other technology partner owned funds who have experience in building disruptive technologies for impact. 

Sharing our vision at goalkeepers conferences, TED platforms (not TEDx), or similar videos like what CNN shot with us would help share our message better.

Finding deployment partners in organisations like CBRE, JLL, Gensler, Zaha Hadid Architects, etc would help us use architecture firms, corporate real estate firms, international facility management firms as deployment partners to attain scale on our product very quickly.

Partners like Gates Foundation, Straubel Foundation, Khosla Ventures, Seqouia Capital, A16z, would help add an extra layer of legitimacy to our financing and the people backing us. 

Additionally partnerships with organisations like Harvard Medical School, John Hopkins, and MIT would help create the relevant research papers and stories of impact on public health with our devices. 

Partnerships with colleges like MIT would help us use the best talent in the world to share this message, vision, and create impact globally.