Hi, my name is Angad. 

I'm currently 27, live between San Francisco and Mumbai, and spend my time running Praan. 

I grew up in Mumbai, and played football (soccer) professionally for 10 years. I loved the game, but my coach Mohan Pillai almost ran it like a military camp - it was tough, but one of the best experiences of my life. I also grew up with Asthma and was never allowed carbonated drinks, jam, or ketch-up. The asthma coupled with pollution in India kept me from my true potential of becoming a professional football player. Something that manifested itself as the company I currently run. 

In 4th grade however, I began to find science fascinating, and started building things at home - lego robots, solar boats, mini robots, etc. I always wanted to build a car and throughout my childhood, and have designed several hundred cars as a kid. I didn't know much engineering so every summer I would salvage waste cardboard boxes from my father's office, and use them to build what would look like a car - once I even looked at the bonnect mechanism used in the Maruti Suzuki Zen and replicated it with accurate dimensions in cardboard. 

All through middle school and high-school, I competed in science competitions and was even a regional finalist at the Google Science Fair. I learned the violin and enjoyed music and found sound interesting - perhaps my first exposure to signals. The fact that the same wire could be used to transfer electricity but also music, fascinated me. So I would build and ship homemade speakers to my classmates in 7th grade, and even sold some to my teachers. 

I acquired my early technical skills watching YouTube videos by MakeMagazine, KipKay, JeremyBlum and others. One that was consistent amidst all their videos was DIY Electronics Kits. I simply couldn't find an Arduino or an Altoids tin can in India in 2010/2011. So at age 12, I decided to build a DIY kits company called Sharkkits so that every science loving kid (like me) could enjoy building small projects and learn new skills as a byproduct. 

In grade 9, I built one of the first 3D printers in India (2012) based on the opensource RepRap project, and then went around teaching college students how to build them - 3D printers are magical devices. Few months later, I dropped out of school and started open schooling under a private tutor - I left school, not education. In fact, I ended up giving 10 grade exams from two separate curriculums - NIOS from India, and IGCSE from Cambridge. I skipped 9th grade, and took my 10th grade exams while my peers were still in 9th grade - this gave me an extra year to pursue my hobby of building things!

While open schooling, I worked under Dr. Ramesh Raskar at the MIT Media Lab on the MIT India initiatives - building an e-reader for the blind, a mobile-app based stereo-pupil tracker to detect peripheral vision defects, and also a wearble ECG Monitoring belt to detect cardiac arrhythmias using AI.  In parallel, I founded my second startup, which was a low-cost 3D printing company called Sharkbot 3D Systems, because as a teenager,  I couldn't find the $2000 needed to buy a Makerbot. 

I was 14 at the time, and found myself surrounded by engineers, doctors, and enterpreneurs who were solving civilisation scale problems in a matter of weeks and then building companies to bring that impact to life. This changed how I looked at science and technology. 

During this time, I also got to present our work to Mr. Ratan Tata (an absolute dream for me). At age 14, I found myself along with 2 other innovators in a closed meeting room at the Taj President Hotel in Mumbai, with Mr. Tata and his associates. I later went on to learn that he funded the MIT Media Lab's India initiative post that meeting. As another instance of pitching our work being done with MIT, I also got to present to then president - Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam at LV Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad. Funnily, he told me, "Don't go back to school!"

Someone who prepared my for my pitch to Mr. Tata, also ran Asia's largest TEDx event (TEDxGateway) - and so at age 14, I gave this talk at the event (a little embarrassing to watch today) - one that brought me a lot of media attention very early in life.  As much as it brought on pressure, it also brought on tremendous opportunities. My 3D Printer startup (Sharkbot 3D systems) and my DIY Kit Company (Sharkits) suddenly had an overnight waitlist. 3D printing was very cool at the time, so once the talk went online, a venture capitalist in India reached out to me stating he wanted to invest some money into my 3D printing startup. I distincly remember telling him that "My parents have asked me to focus on school." - so happy I did.  As my talk did well, and more and more media outlets picked up on the story, I was fortunate to be invited to speak at events all across India and met so many people - from government officials, to industrialists, to atheletes. Dropping out to build things was not common it appeared. 

Later, I went back to school and studied Electrical Engineering at Georgia Tech, in Atlanta. During college, I worked on Electric Vehicles, Stationary Battery Pack Systems for Grid-level energy storage, and even defense radar systems (the recent wars have unfortunately made them quite popular). However, I would always question why there was no Tesla for clean air? Why had air pollution not been solved? All life on earth is powered by air, and yet "leaders", "experts", "scientists", have all left the problem unsolved? Childhood memories of growing up with Asthma and never becoming a profesional football player because of breathing issues haunted me. 

At age 19, after having worked with MIT, and while being a student at Georgia Tech, I realised I was perhaps in the best position of my life to have a shot at this problem. If I failed, nothing would happen, but if I succeeded, I would have created a solution for all of civilisation. With support from Dr. Joyelle Harris at Georgia Tech, I started building Praan out of my dorm room, and as luck would have it, soon after I finished a semi-working, janky, duct taped prototype, CNN reached out to me. The media attention all through childhood seemed to have still left a small trickle even in 2017. When CNN learned that I was working on the air pollution problem, and that I was in Atlanta, they immediately sent over a team to shoot with me. Dr. Sanjay Gupta presented my story as "Tomorrow's Hero", a video which went viral and perhaps was the start of Praan. The video attracted the best talent, but also customers even before there was a product. 

I was pursuing a moonshot - trying to Rebuild Earth's Atmosphere with filter-less purifiers, phytoremediation systems, and computer-vision based air quality mapping systems - with no connections in venture capital, while being on a student visa, and while pursuining a very hard academic degree as an international student. However, what started with me alone, grew to almost 280 people volunteering their time to help bring Praan to life - these were students from Georgia Tech, Emory, Stanford, but also engineers from Tesla, SpaceX, Apple and others. Our first filter-less purifier was built in less than $10,000.  I've written Praan's early story on Medium - building it without any funding, and then trying to learn the strings of venture capital. 

Fast forward to 2026, Praan has built:

•  An outdoor filter-less purifier called MKOne, 

• One of south-east Asia's first Direct Air Carbon Capture Systems, 

• A filter-less industrial air purification system called MKII, and solved pollution in a steel factory where PM2.5 levels exceeded 100,000 ug/m3. Later went on to serve 20+ factories across food, pharma, pigment, spices, specialty chemicals, and more

• An indoor air purification platform called HIVE, which today has over 1200 active nodes in 7 countries - HIVE will benefit over 2 Million People in 2026. 

• A factory to make the best air quality management technologies abundant, amidst other key intelligence and R&D projects. 

Today, our work is backed by Accel, Prosus, Social Impact Capital, and angels from Tesla, Anduril, Boom, and a16z, amidst others. We are now focused on extending our offerings beyond air purification to rebuild the century old, global air infrastructure.   

I believe that fixing the air, and having every room optimise the air to the physiology of the occupants,  will not only help people live longer,  but will bring back hundreds of billions of  dollars in productivity to the economy. 

Outside of Praan, I'm still passionate about football, F1, marine biology, and the future of learning.