Building a deep-tech, hardware, cleantech, moonshot amidst the pandemic without VC money
I spent most of my undergraduate days at Georgia Tech working towards building solutions to create a cleaner atmosphere in cities. Sounds over-ambitious? Probably is.
In reality, it is the people who don’t know what they are getting into that often take on projects which are mostly unrealistic — I am one of those people. It’s the act of not knowing and an unwithered passion to solve a problem which pushes us to take on challenges which most experts would choose not to spend their time on. The one which I took on was the mitigation of urban air pollution through the use of outdoor air purification systems — one of the most argued, criticized, and risky spaces in the clean tech sector.
My naïve motivation to solve this problem came from the fact that while I could easily move to a different country with a cleaner and healthier atmosphere, I could not expect my family and dearest friends to leave everything behind, and do the same. Their entire lives were in Mumbai. Hence, all I wanted to do was to figure out if at all it was possible to improve outdoor air quality, without government policy, without changes in consumer behavior in short term, and to create a healthier environment through the private sector. Sounds crazy and unrealistic. Definitely was. Until we made it realistic.
The easiest (and in my personal opinion, lamest) approach would be to build a simple air quality monitoring system either through the use of IoT-based sensors or through satellite imaging, and be one of the thousand people to display this information with numbers on screen. It’s easy. It’s low risk. You can even get financial institutions to be your customers. But that would not solve the problem, and definitely not help me go to sleep at night. Hence, I took a pass on the solution which equates to “talk” and not “action”. No offence to those who do it, it’s probably a good business, and very easy to raise funding for as well!
In summer of 2017, I had just given up a summer internship at Facebook in Menlo Park, so that I could change my visa status and go to a different college (I transferred from UMass Amherst to Georgia Tech). As much as I was looking forward to this incredible opportunity to work at FB under my mentor Ramesh Raskar, Praan would have not existed had I taken the FB opportunity. When I started working on this project (at the time I called it Project Breathe), I had just received my transfer admit from Georgia Tech and had flown back home to Mumbai, India for the summer to swap my visa, which would allow me to transfer schools. I had zero expertise in air purification, zero expertise in fluid dynamics, and a weak understanding of what were the different constituents of air pollution.
One of the biggest barriers I faced from 2017–2020 was that I was a student on F1 visa in the United States. While it’s the best ever educational opportunity, it’s the worst space to be if you are a social entrepreneur like me. You are legally not allowed to raise money or start a company while being a student there. Let me clarify — it’s not that people have not done it. There are many loopholes people take advantage of such as incorporating a company and declaring that you are not working, simply by differing your salary or rewards. It’s sleazy, I chose not to go that route. In fact there was an instance in school where the international student office felt I was violating the F1 clauses(I had Praan in my email signature), and as a precaution they legally threatened to kick me out of school and of the United States. Fortunately, we had not violated anything and in few weeks, this issue settled. Hence, my school could legally not support me in building a company, and if they supported me financially through research programs, they’d own my intellectual property. As a result, I could only reach out to specific professors and mentors in a personal capacity and fund everything myself out of pocket without incorporating a company. This made everything exponentially harder. I could not bring on co-founders and allocate equity, I could not raise external money from angels or grants, and hence was on my own. However, it taught me to be frugal, to be lean, and to spend only on what truly mattered. We built Praan out of Vishal Devidas, Rishabh Patel, and Meet Patel’s living room at Centennial Place Apartments in Atlanta. We tested in parking lots. We physically carried prototypes and parts several feet in length for over 2 miles every day. We had no lab. We had no money. We had 32 passionate people.
In the 3.7 years of running Praan, we have spent only $38,000! If we did this the venture route from 2018, we would have spent north of $30 Million to get to the exact same place. We may have just gotten there in 2 years as opposed to 3.7 years, but me being enrolled in a super rigorous electrical engineering program while trying to build Praan also had a lot to contribute to the increase in time. Moreover, the targets we have hit today would have been impossible without the support of 184 super talented and passionate people from all around the world, who volunteered their time to help solve this problem. I call these people the 184 founding members of Praan. Their names will be on the walls of every office we ever build.
Over the past few years, I dived wide and deep into understanding the space, built every existing technology with the help of all these individuals in Atlanta and Mumbai. We built filter-based solutions, filter-less solutions, bio-engineered solutions, and so much more! We even had to invent testing techniques to be frugal and yet get the same or more accurate results as expensive methods!
I was all set to graduate from college in Spring 2020 and run this company full-time. I even started pitching to Investors in January 2020 and managed to raise $1.35M in soft commits from investors by mid-march. Three days later lockdowns were enforced globally, and we lost our funding. I guess soft commits don’t mean anything.
I graduated in May 2020 with my bachelors in Electrical Engineering. I had spent 3 years, borrowed money from friends and family, and given up internships with Facebook, Harvard Medical, and Tesla to build a company which had only INR 75,000 (~$1000) left in the bank. I had spent almost $250,000 on my undergraduate education and graduated amidst the pandemic with no job or funding. We also only had 3 people working remotely with us at the time, and with global lockdowns, air quality started to improve — suddenly nobody saw what we were building as a necessity or a priority. How do you even begin to turn things around?
Turning things around
Soon after I graduated, I went back to speak to VCs and angels whom I was previously in touch with. All of them passed on Praan. The sharky ones used my age (21 at the time) against me and said I had a lot to learn hence they would give me $100,000 for 30% of my company. Others with bad ideas and no entrepreneurial experience offered me $300,000 for 22% of my company to completely quit what I’m doing, drop the mission, and build a lame, branded, consumer product. All of these were terrible deals and all I had to do was be patient and keep making progress slowly — everyone in the world was simply trying to survive, and my market had suddenly disappeared with the disappearing air pollution. But I knew it was going to come back much worse with pent up consumer demand. I was doing Praan for the mission and not so much for the short term profits. If I was worried about short term profits, I would have built something else — this was all too painful for just making a few hundred thousand dollars.
I realized that we needed people, and some little pocket money to keep going. Since lockdowns were enforced, we anyways couldn’t buy hardware and build gaseous elimination products at home in Mumbai. But, we could make progress on customer conversations, on hardware design and planning, on UI/UX and software, on data science, and more. Due to the the global slowdown, millions of people lost jobs, internships, had nothing to do, and were looking for difficult projects to help build their resumes and unlock their next internship. Fortunately, while I was in the USA, I had built good contacts at Tesla, Apple, SpaceX, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and few others. Hence, I went onto to LinkedIn with a “Praan Remote Internship Program” offering students the opportunity to get their names on patents they contributed to, and if they did well, I was making introductions to some of these top companies for the next semester of internships and co-ops. Fortunately, this was Praan’s saving grace. More than 2000 people applied and I had to ask my friends Sidharth Parwani, Shivani Adusumilli, Luke Rucker, Amogh Taraikar, and Sanjana Raman to help me interview these people. This is what turned things around for Praan. We hired 47 super talented remote interns, and I was working across 7 time-zones for over 8 months (3 months + 5 months over 2 programs) to keep making progress and realize our dream. We kept all our promises — both on the patent side and helping people gain top internships and jobs.
People loved the remote intern program and became evangelists for our work ethic and team. As our exceptional program manger Anantha Padmanabhan who is currently an NPI Engineer at Tesla wrote, “Praan is and will continue to be a great example of innovation and passion. Despite remote internship with 7 time zones and 40 amazing minds, the degree of ownership and quality output given by every member are stunning. An extremely dynamic company, believes in a vision and live by it in the smallest details. Personally, every day was a learning in new technology, every day was a milestone to excellence. Also, the level of transparency and freedom of opinion is unparalleled. Praan will make sustainability a viable option for the world.”
Alongside running the remote intern program, I had enrolled for Georgia Tech’s Create-X Startup Launch Accelerator. While this only gave us $4000 in grant money (which reached me 2 months after the end of the accelerator program), it helped us build the discipline to hit key benchmarks before every Tuesday meeting. While my market had disappeared (unlike the other startups in the program), I had an army to help build a product for the entire world, once this pandemic had passed.
During the summer alone, Praan’s Business and Growth Team had spoken to 2000+ end customers in 8 cities across 3 continents and all segments of B2B that we were catering to — this helped us utilize people’s downtime in lockdown for detailed user research! Additionally, I had onboarded a dear friend Nilay Kulkarni to redesign our entire software stack for scale. I met Nilay when we were both working with the MIT Media Lab’s India projects. Nilay is a ninja. During our weekly conversations, Nilay once mentioned the Emergent Ventures program run by Tyler Cowen and immediately introduced me to the team — they later went on to give Praan a $22,500 grant which helped keep us alive, build the MK One prototypes, and sign on the biggest early customers. Hence, of the $38,000 we had spent till date, we received $26,500 only after August 2020. After this, Soham Bhosle from our team championed a $68,000 software grant with the Autodesk Foundation. Things were slowly beginning to turn around. We began investor conversations again in October 2020 and managed to raise $250,000 in angel money within 3 days. At a terrible valuation. However, at least people were willing to invest in us — stark difference from earlier the same year in the pandemic. We didn’t eventually accept that money due to the bad valuation and endless delays in government compliance — however kept making progress and acquiring customers. Shit suddenly got too real too quick once the big names signed on as pre-order customers, and we even won a government tender.
Today, Praan has relaunched it’s website allowing people to see the first product we’ve built for the past 3.7 years — the MK One. We have also built solutions for capture and use of CO2, Methane, and other gases. We’ve built an entire array of intellectual property in sensing, and delivering impact at scale. People often forget that originally, businesses were built without venture funding, without external investment. My father and his business partners built a company shipping more than 1 Million products a year without any external financing — slowly earning profits and reinvesting it into growth over 30 years.
As Praan moves on to raise money and has been fortunate to receive commits from some AMAZING people, I’m extremely grateful to our team, mentors, and my family for believing in what we are doing. We were also very fortunate to be backed by the office of the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Prime Minster of India through his program Agnii — here’s our MK One on Agnii’s website.
COVID-19 as a pandemic killed 3.5M people globally. Air Pollution kills 7M people every year. There are almost 2 Billion Cars in the world, and a global energy production system which must be converted to renewable sources. During this transition, cities are going to choke up with air pollution and our CO2 emissions may tip climate change to a point of no return. Praan is designed for that 30 year period while the world transitions to clean energy and transportation. Yes, it’s a moonshot. Yes, it’s deep-tech. Yes, it’s hardware. Yes, it’s difficult. Climate problems can only be solved through deep-tech and hardware, and one has to literally change the world to deploy these solutions. Praan has taken the government, businesses, story tellers, and the best team along this journey to solve this problem together. I’ll let you know how it goes. Always remember, activism doesn’t solve problems. Action does. Wondering why I used so many adjectives in the title of this piece? It’s all the words which makes most investors say no almost immediately.
If you are passionate about what we are doing and would like to work for Praan, do consider applying here. If you would like to invest in our products and mission, you can find me on LinkedIn.
