Startup Deep Dive : Praan — a filterless air purifier company whose bestseller uses a filter

Praan builds air purifiers that need no filters — a claim carrying its own contradiction, since the company’s best-known product for homes, HIVE, ships with a conventional HEPA H14 filter that needs replacing (Amazon.in product listing, accessed September 2026; praan.io, accessed September 2026). In April 2026, the Mumbai- and San Francisco-based startup signed on to fit its AI-controlled purification hardware into more than a million square feet of real estate for developer Superb Realty, on the back of a company whose most recent disclosed annual revenue, for the year to March 2024, was ₹1.76 crore (TheCompanyCheck, aggregating Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings, accessed September 2026; mgsarchitecture.in, April 2026).

This is the story of a founder who started building air purifiers in a Georgia Tech dorm room at 19, watched a near-complete funding round evaporate in the first weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic, kept the company alive on a personal loan and a volunteer army of engineering students, and has since signed institutional VCs, a listed steel major’s pilot, and — most recently — a real-estate developer betting on air quality as a sellable feature of a building. It is also the story of a company whose public financial record remains thin enough that this piece had to cut more numbers than it could keep.

Quick facts

What they do

Praan makes machines that pull polluted air through an electric field rather than a physical filter, charging particulate matter so it collects in a chamber that is periodically emptied — the company’s pitch is that this removes the recurring cost of buying and replacing filters, which it says is the real expense of running a purifier at industrial or city scale (praan.io/technology, accessed September 2026; Inc42, 2024). Its buyers fall into three groups: industrial and institutional customers who install MK-II units on factory floors and in large public spaces to cut particulate exposure for workers and visitors; consumers and small offices who buy the HIVE unit — a smaller, HEPA-filter-based indoor purifier — for a single room; and, most recently, real-estate developers who want purification designed into a building rather than added to it after the fact, the model behind Praan’s April 2026 tie-up with Superb Realty in Mumbai (mgsarchitecture.in, April 2026; constructionworld.in, April 2026).

The origin

Angad Daryani grew up in Mumbai with asthma, and his family would reportedly leave the city during its most polluted winters (thebetterindia.com, accessed September 2026; globalindian.com, accessed September 2026). He was already an unusual engineer by the time air pollution became his focus: he built a robot at eight, a 3D printer at thirteen, and by fifteen had built the Virtual Brailler, an e-reader for the visually impaired, after emailing MIT Media Lab professor Ramesh Raskar at fourteen and getting a reply that led to two years of collaborative work (thebetterindia.com, accessed September 2026). He later enrolled in electrical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, graduating in 2020 (thebetterindia.com, accessed September 2026).

The founding insight, as Daryani and later coverage of Praan describe it, was narrow: most air purifiers rely on physical filters, and filters are consumables — they clog, need regular replacement, and become expensive to run at the scale of a factory floor or a city street rather than a bedroom. In 2017, during his sophomore year, he began building purifier prototypes in his Georgia Tech apartment on the bet that an electrostatic, filterless design could clean large volumes of air without that recurring cost, eventually bringing the idea back to Mumbai for a summer of prototyping in 2018 (thebetterindia.com, accessed September 2026; Inc42, 2024).

The struggle years

Praan’s early years ran almost entirely on volunteer labour, not capital. By Daryani’s own account for an MIT Solve submission filed around July 2020, more than 115 students from Georgia Tech, MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon had contributed to the project over roughly three years, with the working team’s size swinging wildly — from a peak of 64 people down to as few as two, then back up again — as the effort moved between semesters, cities and a pandemic (solve.mit.edu, submission dated 2020). That volatility was not a footnote; it was the operating model for years before Praan had outside institutional money.

The clearest near-death moment came in early 2020. Praan had pooled around $1.35 million in soft commitments from Indian venture capital firms and angel investors — but on terms Daryani later described as poor, and before the round could close, Covid-19 arrived and the deals fell apart (thebetterindia.com, accessed September 2026). With no institutional funding and a volunteer team, the company’s earliest R&D had already depended on a $15,000 unsecured loan from Naresh Shahani, managing director at BMGI and later a Praan director, which Daryani says he eventually repaid at double the amount by 2021 (thebetterindia.com, accessed September 2026).

• 2018: Prototype demonstrated to India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, around the same period CNN featured Daryani in its “Tomorrow’s Hero” series (thebetterindia.com, accessed September 2026)
• Early 2020: Roughly $1.35 million in soft VC and angel commitments collapses as Covid-19 derails dealmaking, on top of already weak terms (thebetterindia.com, accessed September 2026)
• 2018-2020: Working team size fluctuates between roughly 64 and as few as two volunteers as the all-volunteer model strains under funding gaps (solve.mit.edu, 2020 submission)

The turning point

With the 2020 round gone and volunteer numbers thin, Praan’s survival capital came from an unlikely source: Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures programme. Daryani has written that a first Emergent Ventures grant of $22,500 arrived within days of applying during the pandemic lockdown, and was, at that point, the single largest check the company had received (angadmakes.medium.com, “Emergent Ventures changes lives — it changed mine”). Cowen backed Praan a second time through the programme, publicly naming Daryani, then 22, as a winner of Emergent Ventures India’s third cohort on 19 September 2021 (marginalrevolution.com, 19 September 2021).

Set the before and after side by side. Before September 2021, Praan was a company sustained by a personal loan, unpaid student labour and two philanthropic grants worth tens of thousands of dollars combined. Under four months later, on 12 January 2022, it closed a $1.56 million institutional round led by Social Impact Capital, with Better Capital, Paradigm Shift Capital, Avaana Capital and the Quality of Life Investments Texas angel syndicate participating (india.entrepreneur.com, 12 January 2022; siliconindia.com, accessed September 2026) — more than sixty times the size of that first Emergent Ventures check, raised in a fraction of the time it had taken to survive the two years before it.

The money behind it

Praan’s disclosed fundraising history is short and mostly grant- and angel-led before its one confirmed institutional round.

• 2020 (during Covid-19 lockdown) — $22,500 Emergent Ventures grant: Tyler Cowen’s philanthropic venture programme; by Daryani’s account, the largest single check Praan had received to that point, and what kept R&D funded after the 2020 VC round collapsed (angadmakes.medium.com)
• 19 September 2021 — second Emergent Ventures grant: Cowen backed Praan a second time, publicly announced as part of Emergent Ventures India’s third cohort (marginalrevolution.com, 19 September 2021)
• 12 January 2022 — $1.56 million seed round: Led by Social Impact Capital, with Better Capital, Paradigm Shift Capital, Avaana Capital and the Quality of Life Investments Texas angel syndicate; earmarked to expand the Indian team, move from prototypes to B2B pilots, stabilise manufacturing and fund early direct-air-capture research (india.entrepreneur.com, 12 January 2022)
• Angel backers reported by Inc42 (2024): Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Apollo Global Management’s Nipun Sahni, and Innov8 founder Ritesh Malik, alongside early supporter Naresh Shahani, who also facilitated introductions to venture investors (Inc42, 2024)
• Total raised: Trackers vary — CB Insights lists $1.85 million, The Better India reports “$1.9 million,” and Inc42 (2024) put cumulative funding “since 2021” at roughly $2 million; this piece uses the range rather than picking one figure (cbinsights.com/company/praan, accessed September 2026; thebetterindia.com; Inc42, 2024)
• Reported target, not a closed round: Inc42 (2024) reported Praan was seeking a $16 million Series A; no source reviewed for this piece confirms that round has closed

What each backer changed, on the record available: the Emergent Ventures grants bought survival time and, as important, a credibility signal that Daryani has said helped open doors with venture investors; Social Impact Capital’s lead brought the company its first real institutional validation and a US-based investor with an explicit climate mandate; and the angel syndicate around Vijay Shekhar Sharma and Ritesh Malik gave Praan operator-investors with their own India consumer-hardware and real-estate networks to draw on for pilots.

How it makes money

Praan’s revenue lines split by product and, so far, by how “filterless” each one actually is.

• MK-II industrial units (filterless): Sold to factories and large facilities for particulate control; commercially launched in July 2024 after a December 2023 soft launch, rated at a purification rate of 1,300 cubic feet per minute and designed for environments with airborne particulate concentrations up to 40,000 micrograms per cubic metre (thebetterindia.com, accessed September 2026). The Marico Innovation Foundation, which inducted Praan into its Scale-Up programme in December 2023, cites the unit as cutting PM2.5 by up to 40% in industrial settings at roughly 70% lower cost than filter-based alternatives (maricoinnovationfoundation.org, accessed September 2026) — the core of Praan’s “no recurring filter cost” pitch to B2B buyers.
• HIVE indoor units (filtered, not filterless): A machined-aluminium home and small-office purifier using a medical-grade HEPA H14 filter rated to capture 99.99% of particles down to 0.015 microns across roughly 345-350 square feet, sold direct-to-consumer through Praan’s own store and Amazon.in, with app control and Praan-branded “EDITH AI” software (Amazon.in listing, accessed September 2026; thebetterindia.com, accessed September 2026). This is the product line where the company’s own marketing and its physical hardware are hardest to reconcile: the brand is built on eliminating filters, but its most consumer-visible product runs on one.
• Institutional pilots and MoUs: As of a May 2025 investor account, Praan was piloting with Oberoi Hotels, the Ecole Mondiale school and Tata Steel, and had signed a memorandum of understanding with the Aditya Birla Group, with “advanced talks” underway with other commercial real-estate and education campuses (climateangels.in, 11 May 2025). Praan’s own website separately lists Epsilon, Pidilite, Wipro, Mahindra and the Jindal Group as clients — a company-stated list this piece could not independently verify (praan.io, accessed September 2026).
• Building-integrated infrastructure deals: In April 2026, Praan and developer Superb Realty announced plans to integrate AI-led air infrastructure across more than one million square feet of Mumbai real estate, starting with the Superb Altura commercial project before extending to residential and mixed-use developments (mgsarchitecture.in, April 2026; constructionworld.in, April 2026; mumbailive.com, April 2026) — a project-based model distinct from selling standalone units.
• Sanctuary (pre-revenue, company-stated): Unveiled through invite-only access on 17 May 2026 as a system meant to redesign a building’s entire air infrastructure rather than add a purifier to it, Praan says that in the following 65 days, projects worth a combined $434 million joined a waitlist, including more than six million square feet of Indian luxury real estate representing roughly $30 million of that total. The company says internal prototypes are complete and multiple patents have been filed, with the first mass-deployable home systems targeted for 2027 (cbinsights.com/company/praan, accessed September 2026). This piece could not find independent press verification of the $434 million figure and treats it as a company claim, not a confirmed number.

The numbers

Praan’s public financial record is thin. Its Indian operating entity, Praan Climate Technologies Private Limited, does not disclose profit or loss in any source reviewed for this piece, and only one clean, dated revenue figure could be independently confirmed.

The FY24 figure and its 36% year-on-year growth rate are TheCompanyCheck’s aggregation of Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings for Praan Climate Technologies Private Limited (thecompanycheck.com, accessed September 2026); the FY23 line is this piece’s own arithmetic, backing out the prior year from that disclosed growth rate rather than a separately reported figure. Two other MCA-filing aggregators, Tracxn and Tofler, list a further, more recent fiscal year with a reported 146% one-year revenue jump and net-profit figures that are, in places, close to or larger than revenue in the same year — an internal inconsistency neither tracker’s public pages resolve, and both differ from each other on which rupee units apply. This piece has not reproduced those numbers. No source reviewed discloses net profit, loss, EBITDA or margin for any year for Praan.

Where the money comes from

Praan does not publish a revenue split by product, sector or geography in any filing or interview reviewed for this piece. What can be pieced together, by business line and location rather than by percentage of revenue:

• Industrial and institutional (MK-II): Factory floors and large facilities, including a pilot with Tata Steel (climateangels.in, May 2025)
• Hospitality and education pilots: Oberoi Hotels and the Ecole Mondiale school, plus a group-level MoU with the Aditya Birla Group (climateangels.in, May 2025)
• Consumer and small office (HIVE): Sold online through Praan’s own store and Amazon.in to individual buyers rather than institutions (Amazon.in, accessed September 2026)
• Real-estate infrastructure (new, since April 2026): Project-based deployment across a developer’s building portfolio, starting with Superb Realty in Mumbai (mgsarchitecture.in, April 2026)
• Geography: Corporate and fundraising base in San Francisco, California (Praan Inc., the entity named as patent assignee), with manufacturing, most pilots and the ROC-Mumbai-registered operating entity based in India (Google Patents, US12320537B2; thecompanycheck.com)
• Company-stated client list, unverified: Epsilon, Pidilite, Wipro, Mahindra and the Jindal Group, per Praan’s own website, with no independent confirmation found (praan.io, accessed September 2026)

The risks

• Pilots and MoUs that have not been shown to convert to contracts: Praan’s named institutional relationships — Oberoi Hotels, Ecole Mondiale, Tata Steel and the Aditya Birla Group MoU — were all described as pilots, trials or memoranda as of the most recent account reviewed (climateangels.in, May 2025), not disclosed long-term supply agreements. In Indian corporate practice, an MoU is typically non-binding, and pilots can lapse without a procurement decision; the gap between “piloting with” and “selling to” is exactly where a hardware-heavy B2B business can stall.
• A funding ambition well ahead of disclosed revenue: Inc42 (2024) reported Praan was seeking a $16 million Series A against a company whose most recent confirmed annual revenue, for FY24, was ₹1.76 crore. Closing that gap requires either a large jump in industrial and real-estate deployments or investor conviction in the newer Sanctuary line, which as of mid-2026 was still pre-revenue and running on a self-reported waitlist rather than signed contracts.
• A brand built on “filterless” that its most visible product does not use: HIVE, the company’s consumer purifier, runs on a HEPA H14 filter that needs periodic replacement (Amazon.in, accessed September 2026) — the same recurring-cost model Praan’s industrial pitch is built to eliminate. That leaves HIVE competing on the industry’s normal terms against established filter-based brands, in a market Inc42 (2024) says will grow at a 28.51% compound annual rate to more than $1.16 billion by 2030, alongside other filterless-technology rivals it names, including Clairco, Urban Air Laboratory, AirPuro, AirOk, Devic Earth and Pi Green Innovations.

The takeaway

The part of Praan’s story worth taking outside air purification is not the technology but the sequence of financing that kept a deep-tech hardware idea alive between 2018 and 2022. No institutional investor showed up first. What showed up first was a personal loan from a single backer, unpaid labour from more than a hundred engineering students across four universities, and two philanthropic grants worth $22,500 apiece from a programme built to fund unconventional bets. None of that money, on its own, could have built a factory-scale purification network. But it bought Daryani roughly two years to keep a prototype alive after a near-complete venture round evaporated with the pandemic — and it was that survival, not a single pitch, that made the January 2022 institutional round possible. For any founder trying to build hardware in a category too early or too unproven for conventional venture capital, the lesson is less about the technology and more about the financing: small, fast, unglamorous capital is sometimes the only kind that will move before the big checks will.

Frequently asked questions

What does Praan actually sell?

Three product lines: MK-II, a filterless industrial air purifier for factories and large facilities; HIVE, a HEPA-filter-based indoor purifier for homes and small offices; and Sanctuary, a newer, unreleased system meant to be built into a building’s air infrastructure rather than added afterward, unveiled through invite-only access in May 2026 (thebetterindia.com; Amazon.in; cbinsights.com/company/praan, all accessed September 2026).

Is Praan’s technology genuinely filterless?

Its industrial line is: MK-II and its predecessor, MK1, use an electrostatic process that charges particles and collects them in a chamber rather than a physical filter (praan.io/technology, accessed September 2026). Its consumer product, HIVE, is not — it uses a conventional HEPA H14 filter that needs periodic replacement (Amazon.in, accessed September 2026).

How much money has Praan raised, and from whom?

Confirmed: a $1.56 million round led by Social Impact Capital on 12 January 2022, with Better Capital, Paradigm Shift Capital and Avaana Capital participating (india.entrepreneur.com, 12 January 2022). Trackers put cumulative funding, including earlier grants and angel money, at roughly $1.85-2 million (CB Insights; The Better India; Inc42, 2024). A separately reported $16 million Series A target had not been confirmed as closed in any source reviewed.

Is Praan profitable, and what does it earn in revenue?

No profit or loss figure for Praan’s Indian entity is disclosed in any public filing reviewed for this piece. Its most recent confirmed annual revenue was ₹1.76 crore for the year to March 2024, up roughly 36% on the year before, per an aggregation of Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings (thecompanycheck.com, accessed September 2026).

What is Praan’s Sanctuary project?

An early-stage system, revealed through invite-only access on 17 May 2026, that Praan describes as redesigning a building’s air infrastructure — ventilation, purification, humidity, CO2 and temperature — around its occupants, rather than selling a standalone purifier. The company says internal prototypes are complete and it is targeting the first mass-deployable home systems by 2027; this piece could not independently verify the company’s reported $434 million waitlist figure (cbinsights.com/company/praan, accessed September 2026).

Sources

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

• The Better India, “Meet the 25-YO Who Built Filterless Air Purifiers Cleaning India’s Most Polluted Spaces,” accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “How Praan’s Filterless Air Purifiers Are Helping India Combat Worsening Air Quality Levels,” 2024
• India Entrepreneur (india.entrepreneur.com), “Praan Raises $1.56 Million Funding,” 12 January 2022
• SiliconIndia, “Deep Tech Startup Praan garners $1.56 mn funding from Social Impact Capital & Others,” accessed September 2026
• Global Indian, “Angad Daryani: Infusing ‘praan’ into the environment by cutting down air pollution,” accessed September 2026
• MIT Solve, Praan solution submission page, 2020
• Angad Daryani, “Emergent Ventures changes lives — it changed mine,” Medium (angadmakes.medium.com)
• Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen), “Emergent Ventures India, new winners, third Indian cohort,” 19 September 2021
• Marico Innovation Foundation, Praan Scale-Up profile, December 2023 induction, accessed September 2026
• Climate Angels, “Praan: Breathing Innovation,” 11 May 2025
• Praan, technology and homepage (praan.io), accessed September 2026
• Amazon.in, HIVE Advanced Indoor Air Purifier product listing, accessed September 2026
• Google Patents, US12320537B2, “Method for efficient deployment of a cluster of air purification devices in large indoor and outdoor spaces,” filed 23 November 2023, granted 3 June 2025
• MGS Architecture, “Superb Realty Partners with Praan to Integrate AI-Led Air Infrastructure Across 1 Million Sq. Ft. in Mumbai,” April 2026
• Construction World, “Superb Realty Ties Up with Praan for AI Air Tech,” April 2026
• Mumbai Live, “First Ever AI-Led Breathable Residential, Commercial Buildings To Reshape City’s Real Estate,” April 2026
• CB Insights, Praan company profile (cbinsights.com/company/praan), accessed September 2026
• TheCompanyCheck, Praan Climate Technologies Private Limited financial profile (CIN U72900MH2021PTC363691), accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, Praan Climate Technologies Private Limited legal-entity profile, accessed September 2026
• Tofler, Praan Climate Technologies Private Limited company report (CIN U72900MH2021PTC363691), accessed September 2026

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