Praan is no longer a volunteer-run organisation

It’s time to go in all guns blazing, full-time.

The only way to solve the air pollution and carbon emissions problems is to go in with a capitalistic-eye.

Praan was a bootstrapped moonshot project at Georgia Tech which started with Angad Daryani in July 2017, and soon saw traction and top-talent volunteering their time from August 2018 to June 2021. Since then, Praan has transitioned from being a project where people volunteered or worked part-time, to being a business focused on profitability and impact at scale.

Fuel + Network + Top Corporate Support

Praan raised an over-subscribed funding round ($1.56M+) led by Peter Thiel & Marc Andreessen-backed Social Impact Capital, with participation from Better Capital, Paradigm Shift Capital, Avaana Capital (early investors in NYKAA, Urban Company, Darwinbox, etc.), Quality of Life Investments Texas, with reputed and diverse angel investors from around the world such as:

• Dr. Maulik Majmudar (Chief Medical Officer — Biofourmis/Amazon)
• Dr. Ritesh Malik (Founder — Innov8)
• Arjun Vaidya (Co-founder — Dr. Vaidya’s)
• Supriya Paul (Co-founder JOSH)
• Surya Panditi (CEO — EnelX)
• Mehul Shah (Co-founder DSP Design Architects)
• Himani Kapadia (COO — More Group UK)
• Dhruv Chitgopekar (Co-founder & COO of Collective Artists Network and Big Bang Social)
• Kshitij Mehta (Co-founder of Collective Artists Network)
• Ankit Kedia (Founder — Capital A)
• Akshay Singhal (Co-founder & CEO — Log9 Materials)
• Mohit Satyanand & Family(Founder- Teamwork Arts)
• Aryavrat Goenka (Co-founder ALPHI, MACL Ltd.)
• Tarun Ledwani (Microsoft)
• Ashwin Kandoi (Co-founder of Winjit Technologies, exit to Schneider)
• Somil Sheth (Professor of Design — Istituto Marangoni)

Praan raised additional capital (beyond the $1.56M) from Climate Angels with investment from Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Founder — PayTM), Ashish Goel (Founder — Urban Ladder), Saurabh Chawla (Executive Director — GMR Infrastructure), and Pravin Gandhi (SeedFund). Praan also received capital from US-based Cool Climate Collective with LP’s from Tesla, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Eventbrite, among others.

This diverse investor backing offers Praan top-VC support and network, access to one of the largest architectural firms in India, one of the largest renewables companies in the world, the largest actor and influencer talent management companies in India, and some of the most prolific angel investors between the US and India. All of Praan’s investors are current or previous business operators with successful exits, serving as amazing mentors and guides for Praan’s ambitious mission and team.

Praan is also fortunate to be supported by Microsoft, ANSYS, and Autodesk through their startup programs. Additionally, Praan is also a part of Microsoft+Accenture’s AMPLIFY program which allows Praan access to Microsoft Research, Microsoft Azure, and Accenture’s Impact consultancy teams for B2B and government projects, when ready.

Deep-Technology focus with the US + India Platforms

Praan has always been a product-first company focusing on finding the best solutions to difficult problems. These solutions must be scalable, environmentally friendly, affordable, and accessible. Hence, deep-tech innovation from the molecular levels to the AI-layers has been at the core of the company. At Praan, you will get to drive change: Internally, we have decision makers and execution experts — near zero hierarchy. This enables members in our team to own their responsibilities as well as the creative and executional freedom to help meet goals. We don’t hover, no one has the time for it.

We use our US entity for global talent, client, and investor access and our India platform for Indian talent, low-cost design, production, test, and high-density deployments of climate technologies. We manufacture in India, and hope to build for the world from here. More than 95% of Praan’s product parts are sourced and manufactured locally in India.

Working with Praan will enable you to build things which matter with access to resources across the planet.

We are focused on building things people w̶a̶n̶t̶ love

Certain things matter while trying to scale climate technologies:

1. The technology/product has to be far superior than what exists in the market.
2. The product must be exciting, fun, and aspirational for people to want to adopt it.
3. Your technology must be scalable and genuinely create positive environmental impact.
4. Your raw materials must be affordable to scale your environmental impact through mass adoption.
5. Your customer must be obsessed with your product.

At Praan, we are obsessed with building products our end users will be obsessed to own. We try to imbibe this culture in design, engineering, manufacturing, UI/UX, Software, and customer experience. Our goal is not to just build the best sustainable product, but to build the best product in that category.

If you are obsessed with attention to detail and want to build something people will love, come join us!

A nuanced problem, an opportunity to set the trend

When we started Praan, it was evident that there was tremendous noise in the market with rainbow-like promises of the air pollution and climate problems being solved, made by Politicians and scientists who were being pressurised to show something for the tax-payer money spent. It’s important to remember that rainbows are illusions, and while we can enjoy looking at them, we must not chase them.

Praan had to start from ground 0 and build our own understanding of the problem, human psychology, technologies, market forces, and customer expectations. We are still learning. We had to create an industry. Air purifiers existed, but none which customers were truly happy with or ones that solved the problem at scale.

Hence we are often required to be the voice of reason amidst the noise and pretence to build and set standards for ourselves and the industry of what may be the right scalable solution(s) moving forward — ones that run on renewable energy, ones that are net-carbon negative, scalable, and affordable to all. Important word being actual SOLUTION not gimmick.

So if you’re passionate about building the future, especially with technology and business that can have large scale impact, you should apply to work at Praan.

Not for the faint hearted: It’s not a volunteering program, its not a charity — it’s a full-time job with meaningful purpose, learning, and growth with velocity.

For some reason, people associate climate and environmental companies with doing something in your free time to “help the environment”. The reality is that building deep-tech climate companies is f***ing hard: You have to bend rules of science, build best-in-class products, credible IP, unique business models which offer the best experience, cost, and benefit to the customers, manufacture them in a sustainable manner, and yet turn a profit and return multiples to investors. Typically, a company has to do one of the above to make money.

Further, since we’re a startup, although funded, we have to solve problems quickly and frugally. There’s no assistant for a job. There’s no other cash cow keeping the business afloat. You own tasks and learn to manage your job amidst other jobs connected with yours. Don’t believe me? Ask any of our interns. A power electronics intern has designed and tested PCBs, found a supplier in China for a semiconductor, done the CHIMPS and IEC documentation for it, quickly learned MQTT protocol and debugged a cloud-firmware patch for another team, set up a new lab in the office, and casually debugged an IoT board in 1 day which he has never seen before. This is an intern who had joined solely for power supply design and testing. He’s only been with us for a month. What was your internship experience like?

Your time with Praan will be filled with learnings in a high pace environment and 99% of people who have worked with Praan in the last 24 months will tell you how it served as a launchpad for their growth and careers.

It’s not free work. Not anymore. Praan pays top-dollar competitive salaries for each role, matches it to your experience and pay grade in that state. Example: Cost of living in California v/s Texas and Mumbai v/s Bangalore. We take your salary in Bangalore, adjust it to Mumbai and add some to welcome you to our team. We want you to work your hardest, but never want you to worry about how you will pay your rent or enjoy that meal at your favourite restaurant on a Saturday night.

That being said, Praan is a place of hard work, of dedication, and relentless pursuit to build something for the greater good. It’s not a generic 9–5 job. Many people at Praan along with me have sacrificed a lot over the past 4 years to bring Praan to where it is today. Some of the most influential investors and clients have instilled their trust in us. Come work with us if you know you’ll respect and value it. If you do, your fulfilment, personal and financial growth are uncapped. It’s an asymmetrical opportunity for your life and ours.

An invitation from me to you

We are eager to build our leadership, grow our India team, and work with amazing people who passionately want to see this climate change and air pollution problem solved. If that’s you and you fit one of our roles, we don’t care where in the world you are, we want to talk to you and work with you.

Show us some indication of relentless pursuit, independent work, passion for climate through action (not activism), and we want you. If you’re in India, you will work with us out of our office in Nariman Point, Mumbai. If you’re around the world, we’ll work with you! Please feel free to drop me a short message with your resume, role, and indicators as mentioned above, and I’ll be sure to reply to you either way! Can’t wait to hear from you!