Startup Deep Dive : Nanoclean Global — the IIT Delhi filter startup whose best month once beat a whole year

In a single month at the height of the pandemic, Nanoclean says it booked more than ₹5 crore in sales of its N95-grade masks. Three years later, the same company’s filed annual revenue was ₹1.2 crore — a whole year that a single month had once beaten. That gap is the entire story of this IIT Delhi-incubated startup: a product built for a slow, invisible crisis (air pollution) that was rescued, and then distorted, by a fast and visible one (a virus).

Nanoclean also walked into Shark Tank India Season 2 asking the investors to value it at ₹40 crore (about $4.2 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0). It walked out with no deal. The company that once claimed the only Indian spot on a global “top 100 startups” list, that won a National Startup Award from the President of India, and that ships to roughly 30 countries, is on paper a six-person business still searching for the market that matches its science. This is how a ₹10 nasal filter became a case study in demand you cannot manufacture.

Quick facts

What they do

Nanoclean sells air filtration you can wear or clip on, aimed at Indian consumers who breathe some of the world’s most polluted air. The common thread across every product is electrospun nanofibre — fabric whose thread diameter is reduced roughly 100 times to create millions of microscopic pores that trap particulate matter while still letting air through.

• Nasofilters: a transparent nasal filter that sticks over the nostrils, priced at about ₹10 a unit; the company states it blocks around 90% of PM2.5 and 95% of PM10 (The Better India, June 2019).
• Naso95: launched February 2022 and marketed as a compact, N95-grade wearable air purifier (YourStory, October 2022).
• Nanoclean AC filter: a washable nanofibre sheet, priced around ₹399, that clips onto a room air-conditioner to turn it into a basic air purifier; launched 5 June 2019, with about 15,000 units sold soon after (Careers360; YourStory).
• Cigibud: launched March 2023 and pitched as a smoking-cessation filter using the same patented nanofibre technology.

The buyer is mostly a health-conscious individual in a polluted metro; the company also sells to hospitals, government bodies and exports across roughly 30 countries.

The origin

The founding insight was personal. Prateek Sharma, an IIT Delhi student who grew up in Bikaner, Rajasthan, watched his asthmatic mother struggle through dusty, polluted air. He tried modifying masks and building nose-insertion buds for her, but she found masks socially awkward to wear in public and the buds uncomfortable. The problem he set out to solve was not “how do you filter air” — that is old science — but “how do you get someone to actually wear a filter all day without feeling marked out by it.”

The answer came from IIT Delhi’s textile and nanotechnology labs, where Sharma worked with faculty members Prof Ashwini Agrawal and Prof Manjeet Jassal on electrospun nanofibre membranes. The result was a filter thin and transparent enough to sit on the nostrils and disappear from a short distance, yet dense enough to catch fine particulate. Nanoclean Global was incorporated on 7 February 2017, incubated at IIT Delhi, and priced its first product at roughly ₹10 so that affordability — not just efficacy — was the pitch. That same year, the company won a National Startup Award presented by then-President Pranab Mukherjee.

The struggle years

A ₹10 anti-pollution product sounds like an easy sell in a country where cities routinely top global pollution charts. It was not. The early years exposed the hard truth that Indians treat air pollution as a seasonal nuisance, not a daily purchase — and a tiny nasal filter, however clever, is a habit most people abandon after the smog clears.

• The awareness gap: demand for nasal filters spiked for a few weeks each winter around Delhi’s pollution season and collapsed the rest of the year, leaving a business with no steady revenue base.
• The product-widening bet: to escape that seasonality, the company kept launching adjacent products — the AC filter in June 2019, then masks — effectively re-pitching the same nanofibre to new use cases rather than scaling one winning product.
• Thin capital: the company raised only modest external money (see the funding section), so it had little cushion to fund the years of consumer education a preventive-health habit requires.

By 2019, Nanoclean had prizes, patents and press — it was named among a global “top 100 startups” list and recognised abroad — but it did not yet have a market large enough to match the acclaim. It was, in the plainest terms, a celebrated science project still hunting for repeatable sales.

The turning point

The event that changed everything was not a funding round or a product launch. It was Covid-19. When the pandemic hit in 2020, the same nanofibre that filtered pollution could filter a virus, and Nanoclean pivoted hard from nasal filters to N95-grade “Nasomask” face masks. Demand went from a winter trickle to a national emergency overnight.

The numbers on each side of that pivot tell the story. Before Covid, the company was a seasonal niche player. During the pandemic, co-founder Prateek Sharma stated that Nanoclean recorded its highest-ever monthly revenue of more than ₹5 crore, and sold over one million packs of Nasomasks in roughly eight to nine months, prioritising hospitals, healthcare centres and government buyers, and exporting lakhs of masks to China, Thailand and the UAE before India’s export ban (YourStory, November 2020). To meet demand, it received about ₹1.3 crore in government funding to set up an N95 mask manufacturing facility. For a business that had struggled to sell a ₹10 filter year-round, a single month now out-earned entire prior years.

The money behind it

Nanoclean has stayed lightly funded throughout — a deliberate contrast to its high-profile awards. The funding picture, drawn from multiple databases, is best read as a range because trackers disagree on totals.

• Pre-Series A, February 2019: about ₹4.2 crore, with participation from LetsVenture, 91Springboard, PitchRight and Al Nour (Techstory, February 2019).
• Total raised (contested): Tracxn logs roughly $0.8 million across four rounds from about 68 investors, while earlier tallies put it nearer $0.6 million — so total external capital is on the order of a few crore, not tens of crore.
• Government grants: multiple non-dilutive grants from the Department of Science and Technology, biotechnology bodies and the Ministry of Human Resource Development (with IIT Delhi), plus the roughly ₹1.3 crore Covid-era manufacturing grant.
• Valuation: no confirmed current figure; Tracxn records a peak valuation of about $5.34 million in October 2017. On Shark Tank India (Season 2, aired 2023), the company sought ₹80 lakh for 2% equity — an implied ₹40 crore valuation — and received no offer.

The Shark Tank rejection matters because it is the clearest external verdict on the company’s ask: investors on national television declined to value the business anywhere near ₹40 crore.

How it makes money

Nanoclean is a physical-product company: it sells filtration hardware and keeps the margin between what the nanofibre media costs to make and what customers pay. The model is straightforward, with a few subtleties that people get wrong.

• Money in: unit sales of nasal filters (~₹10), AC filters (~₹399), masks and newer products, sold direct-to-consumer online, through its own store, via retail and marketplaces, plus bulk institutional and export orders.
• Costs out: nanofibre production (electrospinning), assembly, packaging, marketing to build an unfamiliar habit, and distribution/logistics for low-ticket items.
• Where margin sits: the technology is defensible and cheap to produce per unit, so gross margins on a filter can be healthy; the difficulty is volume and repeat purchase, not unit economics.
• The part people get wrong: a ₹10 product needs enormous, repeated volume to build a real business. The bottleneck was never manufacturing cost — it was persuading enough people to buy again and again outside a crisis.

The numbers

Filed financials show a very small company whose reported revenue collapsed after the pandemic bump and is only now rebuilding. Figures below come from database records of MCA/ROC filings and should be read as such; the Covid-era peak was company-stated and not an audited annual figure.

Two things stand out. First, the scale: even the best recent year, FY25, is a ₹1.2 crore business — a fraction of the more than ₹5 crore Sharma said the company booked in a single peak pandemic month. Second, the direction: FY25 revenue rose 133.5% over FY24, and the company turned an accounting profit, suggesting the post-Covid rebuild is real but starting from a very low base (Inc42; Tracxn).

Where the money comes from

Nanoclean’s revenue mix has swung with the outside world rather than a fixed segment split, which is the surprise for a “product company.”

• By product, historically: nasal filters were the flagship, but masks briefly became the overwhelming majority of revenue during Covid, then faded as the mask market normalised.
• By channel: a blend of direct-to-consumer (own store and marketplaces), institutional/government orders (heaviest during the pandemic), and exports to roughly 30 countries.
• By geography: India-centred, with export spikes — lakhs of masks shipped to China, Thailand and the UAE during Covid before the export ban (YourStory).
• The surprise: the biggest revenue Nanoclean ever saw came from a product (N95 masks) that was not its founding product and from demand (a pandemic) it did not create — a reminder that its top line has been event-driven, not habit-driven.

The risks

• Demand seasonality and event-dependence: the mechanism is simple — anti-pollution buying peaks for a few winter weeks and mask buying peaked with Covid. When neither the smog nor a virus is acute, sales fall off, as the ₹0.01 crore FY23 revenue shows. A business dependent on episodic panic has no reliable base to underwrite fixed costs.
• Sub-scale with strong incumbents: at roughly ₹1.2 crore FY25 revenue and six employees (Tracxn), Nanoclean competes for shelf and attention against far larger air-purifier and mask brands. Small scale means weak bargaining power on distribution and marketing, and little room to absorb a bad season.
• Capital and valuation gap: the company has raised only a few crore and was passed over on Shark Tank at its ₹40 crore ask. If it needs growth capital, the mechanism that bites is dilution or stalled expansion — investors have signalled they will not fund it at the valuation the founders want, so scaling depends on internal cash the small revenue base barely generates.

The takeaway

Nanoclean’s transferable lesson is about the difference between a good invention and a good business. The science was never the problem: a ₹10 filter that blocks most fine particulate is a genuine achievement, and the awards and patents were earned. What the company kept running into is that a preventive-health habit is one of the hardest things to sell, because customers only feel the need in a crisis and forget it the moment the crisis passes. Covid gave Nanoclean a taste of what real, urgent demand feels like — and then took it away. The builder’s warning here is blunt: if your revenue depends on an event you do not control, you do not yet have a market; you have a moment. The work that turns a moment into a market — repeat purchase, everyday habit, a reason to buy when nothing is on fire — is the work Nanoclean is still doing.

Frequently asked questions

What does Nanoclean Global make?

It makes air-filtration products built on electrospun nanofibre: Nasofilters (nasal filters priced around ₹10), Naso95 wearable N95-grade masks, Nanoclean AC filters (around ₹399), and the Cigibud smoking-cessation filter. All are designed to trap fine particulate matter such as PM2.5 and PM10.

Who founded Nanoclean and is it linked to IIT Delhi?

Yes. Nanoclean was co-founded in 2017 by Prateek Sharma (CEO), Tushar Vyas and Jatin Kewlani, and was incubated at IIT Delhi, working with faculty members Prof Ashwini Agrawal and Prof Manjeet Jassal on the underlying nanofibre technology.

What happened on Shark Tank India?

On Shark Tank India Season 2, Nanoclean sought ₹80 lakh for 2% equity, implying a ₹40 crore valuation. It did not secure a deal from the investors.

How much revenue does Nanoclean make?

Per database records of its filings, Nanoclean reported ₹1.2 crore revenue in FY25, up 133.5% from ₹52.2 lakh in FY24, with a net profit of about ₹53 lakh in FY25. During Covid, founder Prateek Sharma said the company hit a peak monthly revenue of more than ₹5 crore, but that was not a sustained annual figure.

Is Nanoclean listed on the stock market?

No. Nanoclean Global Private Limited is a private, unlisted company. It has raised only modest external funding — on the order of a few crore across a small number of rounds, plus government grants.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Tracxn — Nanoclean Global Private Limited, legal-entity and company profiles (financials, directors, shareholding, employees, valuation), 2026.
• Inc42 — Nanoclean company profile (FY25 and FY24 revenue), 2026.
• thekredible — Nanoclean Global financials (FY23 revenue and EBITDA), 2026.
• YourStory — “Pivot and persist: How Nanoclean went from battling air pollution to N95 masks,” November 2020.
• YourStory — “This IIT Delhi-incubated startup is offering an air purifier you can wear,” October 2022.
• The Better India — “This IIT-Delhi Startup’s Innovation Tackles Air Pollution for Just Rs 10,” June 2019.
• Techstory — “Nanoclean raises pre-Series A funding,” February 2019.
• Careers360 — “IIT Delhi start-up launches AC filters to curb indoor air pollution,” 2019.
• Shark Tank India (Season 2) pitch record — Nano Clean pitch details (₹80 lakh for 2% at ₹40 crore valuation, no deal), 2023.
• Ministry of Corporate Affairs / ROC Haryana filing data (CIN U33309HR2017PTC067610), as surfaced via the databases above.

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