Hi, I’m Angad.

I’m 27, live between San Francisco and Mumbai, and spend most of my time building Praan.

I grew up in Mumbai. For almost ten years, football was the center of my life. My coach, Mohan Pillai, ran training almost like a military camp. It was intense, exhausting, and still one of the best experiences of my life.

I also grew up with asthma. I was never allowed carbonated drinks, jam, or ketchup. More importantly, asthma and India’s air pollution kept me from becoming the footballer I wanted to become.

In hindsight, that pain became the company I now run.

I found my love for science in 4th grade and started building things at home: LEGO robots, solar boats, mini robots, and anything else I could piece together. I was obsessed with cars. Every summer, I would salvage cardboard boxes from my father's office and build car-like structures out of them. Once, I studied the bonnet mechanism of a Maruti Suzuki Zen and recreated it in cardboard with surprisingly accurate dimensions.

Through middle school and high school, I competed in science competitions and became a regional finalist at the Google Science Fair. I also learned the violin, which made me fascinated by sound. The idea that the same wire could carry electricity and music felt magical. In 7th grade, I started building homemade speakers and selling them to classmates, and sometimes even my teachers.

Most of what I knew came from YouTube: MAKE Magazine, KipKay, Jeremy Blum, and many others. I kept seeing DIY electronics kits in their videos, but in India in 2010, I couldn't even buy an Arduino. So at 12, I started Sharkits, a DIY electronics kit company, so that kids like me could learn electronics by building things.

In 9th grade, I built one of the first 3D printers in India based on the open-source RepRap project, and started teaching college students how to build them. 3D printers still feel magical to me.

A few months later, I left school and started open schooling under a private tutor. I left school, not education. I skipped 9th grade and completed my 10th grade through both NIOS and Cambridge's IGCSE while my classmates were still in 9th. That extra year gave me more time to build.

Around the same time, I worked with Dr. Ramesh Raskar at the MIT Media Lab on the MIT India Initiative, building an e-reader for the blind, a mobile app-based stereo pupil tracker to detect peripheral vision defects, and a wearable ECG belt that used AI to detect cardiac arrhythmias.

In parallel, I started my second company, Sharkbot 3D Systems. I was a teenager and couldn't afford the $2,000 needed to buy a MakerBot, so I tried to build one instead.

I was 14 and suddenly surrounded by engineers, doctors, and entrepreneurs solving civilization-scale problems. That changed how I thought about science. It wasn't just about building interesting things anymore, it was about building things that mattered.

That year, I presented our work to Mr. Ratan Tata at the Taj President Hotel in Mumbai. It felt like a dream. I later learned he funded the MIT Media Lab's India Initiative after that meeting. I also presented our work to Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam at LV Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad. At the end of the presentation, he smiled and said, "Don't go back to school."

Someone who helped me prepare for the Tata meeting also organized TEDxGateway. So, at 14, I gave this TEDx talk. It's a little embarrassing to watch today, but it changed my life. It brought media attention, opportunities, and customers overnight. Sharkbot and Sharkits suddenly had waitlists, and a venture capitalist even offered to invest. I still remember telling him, "My parents have asked me to focus on school."

I'm glad I did.

Later, I went to Georgia Tech to study electrical engineering. During college I worked on electric vehicles, stationary battery systems for grid-scale energy storage, and defense radar systems.

But I kept coming back to one question: why had clean air remained an unsolved engineering problem?

All life on Earth is powered by air. Yet we had spent centuries engineering almost everything around us while accepting the air we breathe as something outside our control. My childhood memories of asthma, and of not becoming the footballer I wanted to be, never really left me.

At 19, while still a student at Georgia Tech, I felt I was in the best position in my life to take a shot at solving it. If I failed, nothing terrible would happen. If I succeeded, perhaps I could build something useful for civilization.

With support from Dr. Joyelle Harris, I started Praan from my dorm room.

Soon after I built a janky, duct-taped prototype, CNN reached out. Dr. Sanjay Gupta featured the story as Tomorrow's Hero. The video went viral, and in many ways that became the beginning of Praan. Before we had much of a product, it attracted talented people who wanted to help and customers who believed in the vision.

I wanted to rebuild Earth's atmosphere. It sounded absurd, even to me. I had no venture capital network, was on a student visa, and was trying to build a company while studying electrical engineering. But it felt like a problem worth dedicating my life to.

What started with me alone eventually grew into nearly 280 people volunteering their time to help bring Praan to life. Students from Georgia Tech, Emory, and Stanford. Engineers from Tesla, SpaceX, Apple, and many other companies. Our first filterless air purifier was built for less than $10,000.

Since then, Praan has built an outdoor filterless air purifier, one of Southeast Asia's first direct air carbon capture systems, a filterless industrial air purification platform that solved pollution in factories where PM2.5 exceeded 100,000 µg/m³, an indoor air platform called HIVE with more than 1,200 deployments across seven countries, and a factory in Mumbai dedicated to making advanced air technologies more abundant.

Today, we're focused on rebuilding the century-old air infrastructure that surrounds us.

For over a hundred years, we've designed buildings to regulate temperature. I think the next step is designing them to optimize air for the people inside them. Every room should understand who is in it and intelligently orchestrate air purification, ventilation, humidity, CO₂, pressure, and temperature so that, no matter the settings, the air is always the healthiest it can be for you.

I think air optimization will become the next utility in every building. Just as we expect clean water and electricity today, I hope we'll one day be able to choose the air we want to breathe, knowing that no matter the settings, it will always be the healthiest for us.

That's what I'm spending my life building.

Once we build the full air-stack for earth, we can then design for life beyond earth.

Outside Praan, I'm still passionate about cars, football, Formula 1, marine biology, re-usable rockets, and the future of learning.

I got here because hundreds of amazing people supported me. If I can do the same for you in some way, write to me here.