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A Surgeon turned Green Warrior | Dr. Srikanth Sola of Devic Earth
81 Plays3 years ago
In this episode of The Spotlight, we have a founder who is on a mission to improve the quality of air we breathe.
In a candid conversation with Akshay Datt, Dr. Srikanth Sola, CEO, Devic Earth, takes us through his amazing journey. He is a graduate of Stanford University and a former cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic.
It was the love for his country and the will to serve people that brought him back to India. He joined the Department of Cardiology at the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences, Bangalore, where he was astonished to see the rising cardiac cases due to air pollution. He took this as his personal mission and started evaluating and developing technologies that can help in improving air quality.
He founded Devic Earth in 2018 and since then has served many companies with its affordable product offering.
Tune in to this episode to hear Dr. Sola talk about how this green tech company is tirelessly working towards providing clean and breathable air.
Key takeaways:
- Experience of working in the US vs India.
- Subscription model.
- Fundraising journey.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Beyond Campus' Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Akshay, did you always knew what you wanted to do when you passed away to the MBA? I was all over the place. Sort of, what about you? Confused about your career choices? Wondering what steps to take next?
00:00:18
Speaker
In this podcast called Beyond Campus, Saurabh Garg, founder of C4E and Akshay Dutt, founder of Gunati, are on a mission to crack open the career success code for the youth. So let's turn the dream into reality.
Air Pollution and Health Concerns
00:00:40
Speaker
Hi, I'm Dr. Srikant Sola, CEO of Daevik Earth.
00:00:44
Speaker
It is said that breathing the air of a polluted city in India like Delhi or Mumbai is like smoking a full pack of cigarettes. I'm sure we've all heard these types of scary statistics about the hazards of air pollution. As a cardiac surgeon
00:01:01
Speaker
Dr. Srikant Sola actually experienced the hazards of air pollution first hand when his patient, who was a young man with no risk factors, died due to a cardiac arrest that was the direct cause of sustained exposure to air pollution. This had such a deep and lasting impact on him that he spent the next decade moonlighting to find a solution to the chronic problem of air pollution.
00:01:27
Speaker
And boy did he find an innovative solution to this problem. Want to know what it was? Keep listening as Dr. Sola talks to Akshay Tath about his journey to solve air pollution using an innovative low cost solution which could help save lakhs of lives each year. So, Dr. Srikant, what do you call as home? Like, you know, where do you belong to? Like, where did you grow up?
00:01:54
Speaker
Yeah, I've been all over the world. I was born in Vijaywada in Andhra Pradesh. We moved to Barbados in the Caribbean when I was around three or four, and then from there moved to the United States. This was way back in the 1970s. The first movie we saw in theaters was Star Wars. And so that sort of gives you an idea of when we moved. Times in America were much different, especially for Indian immigrants in those days. My father was a doctor.
00:02:23
Speaker
And we moved around to Kentucky, Chicago, a few other places. And my work and studies took me to California at Stanford, to Duke University in North Carolina, Atlanta to study at Emory University. And finally, I worked at the Cleveland Clinic as a cardiologist in Ohio before coming to Bangalore in 2008. So I called Bangalore home. OK. Why did your father want to
00:02:53
Speaker
move out and you know what made you want to do the reverse. Yeah exactly because usually it's the other way around right so yeah so my father I think in those days as a physician opportunities for advanced studies.
00:03:07
Speaker
were more easily available abroad. He was a radiologist and some of the advanced subspecialties you know that you want to do to learn and sharpen your skills were more easily available in other countries. So we moved at a young age and then as the kids grew up then it was we decided to stay more family members came over
00:03:28
Speaker
And yeah, so we've sort of done the reverse migration in 2008. I knew that what I wanted to do with my life was to serve society.
Journey from the U.S. to India
00:03:39
Speaker
I understood this from years before.
00:03:42
Speaker
But working as a cardiologist at the top heart center in the world, I was doing great work. We were saving lives left and right. We were doing the most advanced heart surgery in the world. I developed products that are now in use in literally hundreds of thousands of lives across the world. I helped to develop those products.
00:04:01
Speaker
And but I wanted to do more and I wanted to come back and serve my country. So in 2008, we picked up. But did you have that connect with, like, you know, my country, like, I mean, for a kid who grew up in the U.S., watching Star Wars, was that connected? That's my country, India. Well, you know, what happened was my grandparents were in India. And so I would come back on most summer holidays to spend time with them.
00:04:27
Speaker
The problem is, and you can ask my wife more about this, is that the India that I understood was from my grandparents' generation. So my understanding of Indian culture was like maybe two generations before. So I was always considered old-fashioned by my
00:04:48
Speaker
here is back in India or even back in the United States. I was the old fashioned one, but that's because I learned Indian culture from my grandparents, which was wonderful. But it made me a little bit dated, perhaps. And your wife is also from India. Yes, she was born and brought up here and we met
00:05:05
Speaker
when she was working in the United States. So it wasn't so much a culture clash as much of a few funny generational things. Did you enter medicine following your father's footsteps or like you were like genuinely looking at serving humanity as
00:05:24
Speaker
You know what happened is I entered Stanford back in 1989 as a freshman and I didn't know what I wanted to do. The advantage of the US system is that you can enter a college and it's okay if you don't know what you want to do and they give you the chance to explore.
00:05:42
Speaker
and to try out different things. So I looked at engineering, I looked at anthropology, I looked at physics, for example, and we had really until our second or third year to decide what stream we wanted to enter. That's the way the system was at that time. The way that it works is typically during your summer holidays, you're supposed to do something that
00:06:05
Speaker
will benefit you in your future career. And the only, same thing here, you know, you're supposed to internships and stuff like that. But the only opportunities available to me were really boring opportunities in petrochemical engineering near my hometown, which didn't appeal to me. It's important, but it wasn't my cup of tea. And so instead, one of my seniors had done something very interesting. She bicycled across the United States.
00:06:33
Speaker
for charity with the group of 20 other people. So I did the same thing the following summer from going from San Francisco to Washington DC. I got really, really buff. We would cycle about 125 kilometers a day on average and it was wonderful.
00:06:51
Speaker
And where would you stay at night? Was it all planned? It was an organized trip. So we had some places we would stay at campsites. Sometimes we would stay in people's homes. We stayed in the Buddhist monastery in Denver, Colorado. We stayed in a commune in Virginia.
00:07:09
Speaker
churches and other places opened their doors to us, and it was just really wonderful. It really was a great time. A lot of like-minded people of my own age, I was 18 at the time, people in their 20s and 30s who were there really to make a difference in trying to make a difference in the world.
00:07:26
Speaker
And it was then on one of these long days, you know, 125 kilometers a day is a long, it's a long day in terms of cycling. One of these long downhill rides coming down from the mountains of California into the desert on the other side. You have a lot of time to think. Yeah, and there would be no iPod then. Oh, yeah, we didn't have those things in those days. Yeah, you could listen to podcasts while cycling.
00:07:53
Speaker
Our podcasts were not even understood, yes. But on one of these long downhill rides that took like half an hour to get to the bottom because it was such a long slope, I realized that what I wanted to do with my life was to serve people. And that's what made me happy, was to help others. And that was how I got into medicine. And that's really been my north star, I guess, for my whole life.
00:08:23
Speaker
So getting into like, you know, being a qualified surgeon in the U.S. is like a real grind, I mean, compared to India, like years and years and years of dedication. How was that whole thing for you? Like, tell me a bit about that. Yeah, it was 15 years to become a cardiologist, right? So four years of college, four years of medical school, three years of internal medicine training, and then four years of cardiology fellowships. So 15 years altogether after high school. It's a long ways.
00:08:53
Speaker
And you really grow as a person. You develop leadership abilities, communication skills. You understand the human psyche. You understand body language, posture. You know what it is to see people die and to comfort those who have lost a loved one. You see the best and worst in people.
00:09:13
Speaker
And of course I worked after finishing my training, I worked at the Cleveland Clinic and I was amongst the best of the best really in the whole world. And that was just a fantastic experience being at such a high level of competency. It's a whole stratosphere above what other people were doing. But that idea that, you know, that cycle ride that I had years before,
00:09:37
Speaker
That was still there.
Impact of Air Pollution in India
00:09:38
Speaker
And I said, you know what? I need to do more. And so you were already doing a lot. Like why did you not feel fulfilled?
00:09:46
Speaker
Well, in the United States, at many developed countries, we spend huge amount of resources for people at the end of their lives, often people who are older, which is fine. It's important, right? We all want our loved ones to live happily, healthy, and lives with the high quality of life. But what I saw is that a fraction of those resources, if they were spent on, say, simple interventions in developed countries,
00:10:13
Speaker
would give kids the ability to live. We could fix a hole in the heart, for example, with a fraction of the resources that we were spending on people who had just one or two years left to live because they were already 80 or 90 plus. And it's not a clinical judgment. It's these difficult medical questions that all physicians face. There's no right or wrong answers to this. But what I felt personally to me was that
00:10:43
Speaker
I want to do something more than this. I want to make a difference in the lives of many, many, many people. And so looking around, I was already a part of the Sathya Sai service organization in India, the hospital, the Sathya Sai service organization. So it's people who are dedicated to that teacher's teachings, which are basically serve everyone, love everyone and serve everyone. And there's a charity hospital started by the founder, one in Bangalore,
00:11:12
Speaker
and one in Puttapati and Andhra Pradesh and a few other places. Fantastic facilities. And so I just got an email one day across my desk while I was sitting in my office at the hospital in Cleveland.
00:11:25
Speaker
And it said, you know, so-and-so there's some opportunities available for cardiologists, cardiology fellows. Well, I already finished my training. That wasn't of any interest to me. But then at the bottom of the mail, it said, oh, and there is an opening for a cardiology consultant. So I thought, wow, it just hit me. And I said, this is what I need to do. I can provide free care
00:11:51
Speaker
at a hospital that has state-of-the-art equipment, so I wouldn't be missing anything. You don't want to be in a center where you're working with the best of the best and then suddenly go to some outpost or boondocks and not have anything that you can use to serve your patients. So I'd have the best of the best in a fantastic environment.
00:12:10
Speaker
And I called my wife. She was working. She was an investment banker at the time. She was busy. Then she called me back. I was in the middle of rounds seeing patients in the hospital floor. And we decided right then and there, yeah, let's do it. Let's move to India and let's go and serve our country. And that's how we came back to Bangalore in 2008, just like that. One phone call, one email, it was decided.
00:12:37
Speaker
In these two decades of your education and career in the US, did you often go back to India and serve or do some work or something? How connected were you?
00:12:49
Speaker
I did, but you know, I never thought I would move back to India because I was in a, you know, I was a superstar in the United States and I saw myself doing cutting edge work, cutting edge research, building the latest technologies. That's what I did when I was at the Cleveland Clinic or even in my cardiology training.
00:13:08
Speaker
I was a hardcore clinician researcher. That means that I would see patients and I would provide them with the best care, but I would also do research in ways to help our patients get better, to provide them with better diagnosis and therapies. And that meant to me, in my mind, being at the best centers in the world, which at that time was still probably the Cleveland Clinic today.
00:13:32
Speaker
I didn't have that idea that I would move back to India, but this urge to come back and serve the country, that was always there. The urge to serve the poor, that's never left. And that's what pushed me to make the jump across the ocean.
00:13:48
Speaker
Did you have kids at this time? We did. But our son was only eight at the time, seven or eight. So I think that made it easy. Had he been in, say, high school, oh, that would have been impossible. But children, you know, at that age, they adjust easily. So it was a great adventure for all of us. And how much of a paker did you take? I mean, I imagine you must have been
00:14:11
Speaker
like extremely well-paid at the Cleveland Clinic. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So working for a charitable hospital, of course, the focus is on the work and not so much on the remuneration. We were paid, but it was a fraction, probably maybe 2% of what I was earning in the United States. But you know, the satisfaction, I tell you, I remember one patient, it was a mother and a young girl.
00:14:35
Speaker
And we had done a surgery on her. She had a hole in the heart. And we did the surgery. It was successful. They came back after the operation for a checkup. And the mother said, when can she start to play again? And I said, ma'am, your daughter is completely normal now. She can eat normal food. She can play. She can run. She can do everything normal. And the mother was so relieved. She broke down in tears and thanking me profusely.
00:15:03
Speaker
And I realized that, wow, you know, here, this is, this makes it all worthwhile because you're really, you know, you're bringing people back into the workplace. You're allowing children to finish their education. You're allowing young adults to reenter the economy and contribute, you know, in a meaningful way to their families.
00:15:24
Speaker
you're helping people who, the poor, who have no access to state-of-the-art health care. Their health literacy is often limited. Their access to quality health care is even more so. And this was a great opportunity to provide the best care to those who needed it the most. Okay, okay. And like, were you able to maintain staff learning?
00:15:52
Speaker
in India, like you were getting paid much lower and all that, like how did that adjustment happen? You know, so we came to the Sathya Sai Hospital in Bangalore and it's a 55-acre oasis surrounded by forest and farmland. The accommodations are very peaceful and very good and
00:16:17
Speaker
It was a very loving, very peaceful environment. So while we didn't have the five bedroom house with the Volvo car that we had in the United States, that sense of peace, that sense of contentment, that's priceless. You can't put anything on that. And I think that made it all the more
00:16:41
Speaker
worthwhile. So we were very, very satisfied, very happy with that decision. Of course, you know, if people ask me, what do you miss about life in the US? I said, the first thing I miss is the roads because people can drive. You know, I wasn't used to Indian driving now I am, but not in those days.
00:17:02
Speaker
And the second thing I miss being in Bangalore, a city of now 13 billion people, is the parks. Cleveland had lovely parks, so they had really preserved nature with lovely streams and forests, and we just don't have access to that in Bangalore, at least not easily accessible. And I miss that. I miss that.
00:17:23
Speaker
Okay. And your wife got a job here? Yes, she got a job. She started her own server consultancy and she's doing very well. So, you know, our son has done well in school. And so I really believe that when you do good work, you know, it's a reflective universe, right? Whatever you put out is reflected back to you. So when you do good things, then good things will happen back to you. And that's, that's what happened to us.
00:17:49
Speaker
Okay, so what made you move on from Sri Sathya Sai? So I was at Sathya Sai Hospital for nine and a half years and in my first week, 2008, I'm fresh off the boat having just gotten settled into Bangalore. I still am confused. I walk on the right side of the hallway where everybody else is walking on the left side of the hallway
00:18:15
Speaker
Those kind of things would happen. I was still trying to figure out where things are. One of my first patients was a young guy. He was hardly 28. He was a shoe cobbler. Those fellows who repair sandals and so forth. So he came in with a big heart attack.
00:18:33
Speaker
But not because of diabetes or high blood pressure or any of those things. He actually was breathing in vehicle fumes from working on the street all day long. It was a heart attack due to air pollution.
00:18:46
Speaker
It was the first time I had ever seen that in my professional career. I had certainly read about it. We all knew at that time that five and a half million people die every year due to air pollution. That was 13 years ago. Now the number is seven million deaths per year due to air pollution.
00:19:03
Speaker
I knew about it but this was the first time I had seen it and I did his angioplasty operation. We did the angioplasty operation, opened the blockage and he got well so quickly that a few days later he walked out of the hospital and I gave myself a little pat on the back, did a little dance and I was so happy.
00:19:24
Speaker
Two days later, the same thing happened. Another young fellow, he was 32. He was a taxi driver. Again, no risk factors for heart disease. He didn't smoke, didn't have diabetes or high blood pressure. No family history of heart disease. But he was breathing in vehicle fumes all day long, basically bathed in air pollution. And he came in with also a big heart attack. Did his angioplasty operation.
00:19:51
Speaker
But he died right in front of me. And we tried to save him. I had to go out afterwards and explain to the wife, the parents, the young daughter who was maybe 10 years old at the time was there also, and explain that I'm very sorry, ma'am, but we did our best, but we couldn't save him. And that got me to thinking.
00:20:12
Speaker
deaths due to air pollution. And it just kept on happening. I'd never seen so many people falling sick or getting worse because of air pollution. And I knew that, gosh, you know, how many angioplasties can I do per day? Really, you know, maybe 10, but the need is like hundreds of thousands. 50% of those deaths due to air pollution is from heart disease. So I thought there must be a better way. Can we provide
00:20:37
Speaker
technology to clean the air, but it needs to be something that will work for literally hundreds of thousands of people at a time. How do we make the air clean for everybody? That was my question. Because I'd already done so much work in biomed engineering, working with the likes of Philips and Siemens Healthcare, GE and others, I understood how these things work. I put together a team of
00:21:02
Speaker
of scientists and engineers. We tried several different things, none of them worked. This was going on while you were still? I'm still a cardiologist working six days a week, 10 hours, 12 hours a day, right? So, but you know, the good thing working at Satya Sai Hospital, it's a charitable hospital. So I don't have any financial pressures, right? Meaning it's not like, oh gosh, if I
00:21:28
Speaker
No targets to choose. In private hospitals, doctors have targets to choose. Yeah, exactly. Thank God I didn't have that because the focus was always on providing the best quality care to the patients. That was our bottom line. And that was easy to do because I loved it. But I had this burning thing of, well, how can I help these other five and a half million people who are dying every year from air pollution?
00:21:54
Speaker
Finally, actually my cardiology knowledge gave me the answer through MRI scanning. Many people have done MRI scans for their knee or their brain or whatever it is. You go inside this big tube and it makes a lot of noise and takes pictures of whatever body part needs to be picked. Basically what happens in MRI is that there's an antenna that's put onto whatever part of the body needs to have pictures taken.
00:22:22
Speaker
And that antenna sends radio waves, but they're pulsed radio waves into the body and they bounce back from the body and they are received by the antenna. And then the computer constructs an image which the doctors read and to diagnose the condition of the patient. So that's how MRI works, pulsed radio waves. And I also knew that when we use pulsed radio waves in a different way, we can use it to destroy tumors, cancers, or correct,
00:22:49
Speaker
electrical problems in the heart. And I thought, you know what? Pulsed radio waves are the only thing that will go really a long distance. And if we can pulse these radio waves in just the right way, we can perhaps improve the way that pollution is cleared. And it took us a while, but we figured it out. I figured it out.
00:23:13
Speaker
how to pulse the radio waves, and that's the secret sauce, is how it's pulsed. Basically, I'll just explain it in a very simple manner, you know, during the lockdown.
00:23:24
Speaker
We didn't drive our cars or two-wheelers for a few days, right? And when you go back out, you see a layer of dust on your car or two-wheeler. What happens is that these dust particles, which we usually don't see, they collide together. Some of these dust particles are like tiny magnets. They have positive and negative charges on them.
00:23:45
Speaker
So that just like the magnets you played with in school, it draws them together. They agglomerate or they coagulate, they become bigger. And because they're now bigger and heavier, they settle down to the ground and they settle onto the surface of your car or your coffee table or work desk or whatever surface is there, plants and so forth. Scientists call this process a dry deposition. And it happens all the time. So if you don't wash your car, if you don't
00:24:11
Speaker
go out if you don't wipe your dinner table, you have a layer of dust. That's how it works. That's how nature cleans about two-thirds of the pollutants in the air. So what this pulsed radio waves does is it increases the charge on the microscopic pollutant particles, not the ones that you can see, but the microscopic ones, the ones that we call PM10 and 2.5.
00:24:33
Speaker
because they're 10 microns or 2.5 microns in diameter. Those are the ones that are so small that when you breathe them in, they enter into the lungs. And the PM2.5, which is really, really tiny, it can actually enter the bloodstream and then cause havoc in all parts of the body.
00:24:51
Speaker
In the heart it causes heart attacks, in the lungs it causes lung disease, cancer, and blood clots. In the brain it causes dementia, in the kidneys it causes kidney failure, and on and on. You know, ovaries it causes infertility and so forth. Every organ practically is damaged. So these PM10 and 2.5 when exposed to pulse radio waves in a particular manner,
Innovative Air Pollution Solution
00:25:15
Speaker
their charges are increased and that just attracts them faster to each other. They coagulate faster and they settle out of the air. So that actually works quite well with some limitations, of course, like any technology. But boy, it was really successful. It was really successful. And the 10 or 13 years that I spent developing this technology before the company started,
00:25:41
Speaker
Nice. I had experience with medicines, right? As a doctor, you can imagine I would have seen a lot of new treatments come and go.
00:25:50
Speaker
I didn't want to make the same mistakes that I had seen with certain medicines or therapies that initially seem promising, but were later were not successful because of various issues. So I tested it to make sure it was effective. Then we tested it to make sure it was safe. Then we tested it to make sure it was robust under various conditions, cold and hot and wind and rain and
00:26:16
Speaker
The kicker, what caused a cardiologist to quit his practice and actually join a startup because you have to be either really crazy or really courageous to do what I did. The kicker was that when we looked at our data,
00:26:33
Speaker
of people who lived around the Sathya Sai Hospital where I was working, as well as the hospital staff who lived in the hospital campus. We found that the number of admissions to the emergency room reduced on the days that our technology was on.
00:26:51
Speaker
we found that the number of heart attacks reduced by a third, number of blood clots reduced by 20%, the number of strokes reduced by 30% and even visits to the acute care clinic by our hospital staff also reduced by some 40%. Mainly people weren't getting colds and things like that because they were breathing cleaner air, their immune system was stronger and they felt better. So I was like, man, there's nothing I could do in medicine
00:27:21
Speaker
that makes such a dramatic effect as this. And slowly, slowly, I decided, okay, we've got to make this available to the public. And the best way to do that was to bring out the technology so that others could benefit. And that's how our startup, our green tech company, Vedic Earth, was born. Okay, so I want to understand a bit of a journey pretty, pretty the incorporation.
00:27:49
Speaker
So like, you know, who was working with you on the research? Was it like corporations or was it like this?
00:27:56
Speaker
volunteers or you know and how are you funding that research right right you know nothing there is a saying that success breeds success right and i think we got lucky in the beginning we had a few successful trials we got funding from the ministry of environment in forest we had a lot of support from the central pollution control board which is like the usepa for india
00:28:19
Speaker
They gave us access to their scientists and some of their reference laboratories. We also got funding from various private companies as well as NGOs based in the United States and in Europe who also funded this work and I'm very grateful to all of them. They allowed us to hire staff, to buy equipment,
00:28:46
Speaker
It would always go to the hospital because it won't come to me as an individual but then it would be the grant
00:28:55
Speaker
So you were essentially heading this initiative inside such a site. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And I would always have to do this either before patient care or after patient care. So it wasn't that I could spend days and days doing this. It would always have to be squeezed in somehow before or after the day's work. So the days were long, sometimes 12 hour plus days. And of course, I had staff to take care of the work during the day.
00:29:22
Speaker
It took that kind of dedication to make it happen. What does the solution look like? Can you help me visualize it? Is it like the way you have that?
00:29:35
Speaker
this TV and all of those, is it something like that? Right, right. So the solution, you know, in the first generation, remember how the old iPhones were so bulky and clunky? Yeah, so our first generation devices were like 200 kilograms, maybe four feet by six feet by six feet boxes. Oh, it was really, I mean, it was great, but it was really cumbersome. And then what happened is,
00:30:01
Speaker
And what would these boxes do? They'd be plugged into a power source and then they would... Yes, and they had an antenna inside to broadcast our pulsed radio waves. They had our hardware, some IoT devices in them and so forth that would read the air quality and then give feedback so that we could adjust how the pulses were being sent.
00:30:21
Speaker
and so forth. We tried different types of antennas, all sorts of pulse sequences, and so forth. And eventually we decided, you know what, let's just use Wi-Fi. Because Wi-Fi is just pulse, it's just radio energy, it's radio waves, but with Wi-Fi, number one, everybody knows Wi-Fi, right? I mean, especially now,
00:30:41
Speaker
We have Wi-Fi in our homes and our offices, airports and hotel rooms. It's quite comfortable that the World Health Organization has said it's safe. And then secondly, the hardware is cheap for Wi-Fi. It's not very costly.
00:30:58
Speaker
So we can just replicate that. So that really shrunk the technology to a much smaller box that's now maybe two feet by two feet by two feet. So it's gotten much smaller and easier to use. That can be positioned anywhere, you know, on top of a building or on a say a lamp pole or inside an office if it's indoor.
00:31:19
Speaker
So the beauty of this is that it works either indoors or either outdoors both. It's really the only thing that can improve air quality outdoors across large areas. So this two feet by two feet by two feet box, like how big an area can it?
00:31:37
Speaker
Help remove pollution from so so because if you think of a Wi-Fi network, you know in Wi-Fi that technicians will call it telecommunications They'll call it a point-to-point network. What that means is you can network these boxes together Just like if you've been to an airport remember the old days when we used to fly so Network these you know if you go to one terminal the next and
00:32:02
Speaker
you've got Wi-Fi throughout the entire building. And all they do is they just put their Wi-Fi routers or extenders every usually about 100 meters or so. And that's enough to extend the signal across the entire building, which can actually cover many, many, many acres. So Wi-Fi networks can go very big. In fact, the largest Wi-Fi network is more than 300 kilometers wide in Argentina. And that's used to bring internet signals to remote areas.
00:32:32
Speaker
So you can really extend the range. So we can just put as many boxes as we need, say 250 meters across from each other. And that's enough to cover a large here. Our biggest installation right now is about 750 acres. It's pretty huge. Where is this? This is at one of the steel plants. Okay. So when you decided that you want to
00:32:59
Speaker
like, you know, go all in on this. What were the options in front of you? I mean, you must have thought of doing it through a nonprofit also versus doing a startup. So, you know, tell me about your thought process and, you know, how you then finally decided that you want to do it through a
00:33:15
Speaker
corporation and... Right, right. So we had offers from several companies right away to buy out this technology. Something like GE and Philips and these... Yeah, big guys came and say, you know, this is great. We've seen your results. This is awesome. I know you have a patent on this. We'll buy you out for this much. And this is what we put. But when I got into discussions of what they plan to do with it, I realized that, you know, it's business, right? And they need to make a return on their investment.
00:33:45
Speaker
But their plans were to charge such a high premium on the technology. You know, the purpose for making all this was so for those the taxi driver and the shoe cobbler to breathe clean air. But if you make it so expensive, how are they ever going to afford it? Or how is the city government going to afford it so that it can be utilized for the benefit of hundreds of thousands of people?
00:34:12
Speaker
So that that option of say licensing the technology or selling the patent to someone else didn't really appeal to me because I knew that it would not really reach The millions of people that I had in mind when we created this technology So then I thought well we could go for a nonprofit, but boy that would take forever You know it would be like slow motion
00:34:35
Speaker
So that didn't work. And then I thought, okay, well, shoot, we're in Bangalore. You know, if you throw a stone in Bangalore, you've hit some techie and half of them will be from a startup, exactly. So why don't we just begin a startup and let's try. And I had great friends, you know, really great people who joined me, Bhuma Krishnan, our chief operating officer. My family gave me tremendous support. Other people came forward.
00:35:05
Speaker
And it was that support that I got from my friends, family, and community that really made it possible. It's not easy giving up a career in cardiology, something that I'd worked so hard in, and then taking that dive to become a startup entrepreneur. But once I saw, I remember this was something that could make a difference in the lives of billions of people as I saw it. That was the closing chapter enough to say, okay, let's do this.
00:35:33
Speaker
And what was the plan? Like, did you raise funds, right? You must have needed funds right from day one, no? Because you need to manufacture a device. So you need to spend first. Yes, exactly. Now, remember that we had 10 years running start. So a lot of the technology, you know, things had been worked out already in advance, but there was still a lot more to do. We had to make it
00:35:56
Speaker
more robust for commercial purposes. We had a lot of these things to work out. And it's also a new technology. And when you have a new technology, there's several things that you need to address. One, you want publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals to explain to the public at large, and especially to the scientific community, how does this technology work and how has it been validated?
00:36:23
Speaker
I'm really happy to say that now we have those manuscripts coming out. We've worked with great teams like the team at IAT Kanpur and others who've really been very, very supportive and have helped us to get tremendous results and understand and define the technology more effectively. Second is you want to have it tested independently. It's not enough if I tell you, see this technology will reduce pollution by 50%, blah, blah, blah.
00:36:51
Speaker
I needed somebody else to do the same thing. So it has to be validated independently.
00:36:57
Speaker
of our work. So that also needed to be done. And then third thing is you want to have use cases or proof of concepts in different settings. So let's say cement industries, steel plants, thermal power plants, or what about indoors like shopping malls or schools or corporate offices, for example. And so, of course, that takes time and effort. But three years later, I'm happy to say that we're there and
00:37:26
Speaker
What an amazing journey it's been in these last three years since the company was launched. It's not easy. And anyone who wants to join to start their own startup, I would say think twice before you do it. But it's been the most satisfying thing I've ever done. So like, did you like put in your own money initially, or did you raise funds to, you know, cross all the T's and dot the I's and
00:37:54
Speaker
to actually build an inventory. You must have needed to build an inventory before you could go to market. Right. So the first the first step was to use some of our own family savings. And we did that. My father pitched in as well. And thanks that we had a lot of help from family and friends. And then
00:38:15
Speaker
Then we were able to raise some angel investors from really people who are literally walking angels. They invested in us. They saw the value of what we were doing and they invested us. They believed in the work that we were doing. And then what happens is you have a certain fiduciary responsibility because these people have invested in us and we need to make sure that we
00:38:37
Speaker
return their investments with some kind of return, right? And a good return better than the current market rate. So I understood that and we worked really hard to make sure that happens. Then as sales started to pick up and we were doing quite well,
00:38:55
Speaker
Then we were able to land a pre-series, a investment round with a fantastic team, a venture capital firm called Blue Ashva based out of Singapore. And they've just been an amazing, just tremendous support, really seasoned hands and very encouraging.
00:39:14
Speaker
really helping us to see the bigger picture beyond the vision that we had. And when people ask me, what does it take to make a successful startup? I always say the first thing you need is vision.
00:39:28
Speaker
You need that grand vision. So my vision for David Girth is to be the global leader in green technology. What Elon Musk has done with Tesla, what Steve Jobs did with iPhones for Apple. I want to do that for green technology with David Girth. That's the grand vision. But to execute that vision, to make it a reality, you need an awesome product. You need a great team.
00:39:52
Speaker
and you need a business model that is scalable that will give you returns and that is that you can scale those returns up. So what was your initial business model and
00:40:08
Speaker
Has that evolved like, you know, 2018 when you started up? So initially we were just into sales and, you know, we started with a very low price. I won't give the price because it's not relevant now, but basically we started selling and it was successful. Our customers were happy. But what was your go to market? Like, you know, were you like going out?
00:40:28
Speaker
cold calling corporate or you know how did you get this so so you know our our usb is that we cover large areas you know a traditional say a home air purifier will cover what maybe 500 600 square feet that was not of any interest to us
00:40:44
Speaker
We were, you know, when we set our units up, we can cover 50,000 or 100,000 square feet very easily. So this large area of coverage at high efficacy and low cost, that was what we were looking at. So who are the customers that would want to come to us? Well, one obviously would be the industries who
00:41:03
Speaker
Manufacturing, people who make companies that make pollution as part of their work, steel industries, cement, thermal power, mining, for example, construction companies, even shipping and ports or airports, for example.
00:41:18
Speaker
But then there's another group of customers who don't make any pollution at all, but they don't want to be affected by pollution. So these were customers like luxury hotels, marathons, corporate real estate, schools. We even did a satsang for a Swamiji in Rishikesh in the Himalayas in January and February, just before the pandemic started.
00:41:45
Speaker
And it was an outdoor arena with some 3,000 people every day. And we were able to improve air quality there by 50 plus percent. So we got to do all sorts of lovely things and meet different types of people from a variety of verticals, which made it a lot of fun. But what happened is the pandemic kicked in.
00:42:07
Speaker
And then we found that, well, the sales model is good. But the problem is that a lot of companies don't want to spend a huge amount right now. It makes sense, because loss of income, et cetera. So thanks to Netflix.
00:42:22
Speaker
and others like it, you know, where you subscribe to Netflix and we're all okay with the whole subscription model right now. We actually switched to a subscription model and that's worked great because there's no CapEx expenditure for the businesses. They just pay a monthly fee. They can stop whenever they want. And it makes it really easy for customers. You know, it's funny when my sales people go to say a factory,
00:42:50
Speaker
So the other day we went to a tire factory.
00:42:53
Speaker
they said all the the feedback from the from the head of environment there very smart fellow was oh god how much is this going to cost me and my salesperson said well sure it's on a subscription and it's just going to be 99 paisa per square foot per month and the guy said that's all he said yeah so that subscription model has worked really well for us okay okay and like how many
00:43:22
Speaker
Months of subscription does it take for you to recover the cost of the equipment that you set up at a place? Like when does an account get profitable?
00:43:30
Speaker
Yeah, it depends on the site. I mean, sometimes it can take a year, year and a half or more. But we've done the business modeling to make sure that neither is it too expensive nor is it too low in cost. We do, of course, continue sales, especially for international sales. We're happy to say we just closed our first international deal.
00:43:53
Speaker
for some mines in copper mines in Chile in South America. And we're quickly expanding into the Middle East and South Asia. And by this time, or by first part of 2022, we expect to be in the US and Europe. So it's really fun. This is the stage where it's really fun. You know, where things are growing, they're going fast, the customers are happy, employees are happy. It's a fun time right now. How did you land the Tata Jamshedpur deal?
00:44:24
Speaker
You know, they had a competition, actually, and they contacted us. They said, look, we're a steel plant. And as part of our innovation work, we are looking to we're looking for solutions to improve air quality. Tata is a very sustainable company. You know, they're really
00:44:41
Speaker
very ethical and really they do fantastic work. And they wanted to support companies that would be able to bring innovation in the realm of air quality. But basically they were looking for solutions that would improve ambient air outdoors. That means the air that's outdoors, not the air that comes from their chimneys or stacks in the factories, but what we all of us breathe, the workers would breathe outdoors, what the communities near the plants would be breathing. They were looking for that kind of solution.
00:45:10
Speaker
So we entered a competition, or they entered us in the competition, and we won. And that's how our relationship with Tata Steel started. It wasn't easy. It was a year and a half long process to get there. But it was a good chance for us to prove ourselves. And since then, we've won many, many, many competitions as well. OK.
Technology and its Impact
00:45:36
Speaker
So are there other companies that offer a similar solution?
00:45:41
Speaker
As far as a pulsed radio wave, no, a lot of it has to do with the pulse and how you pulse it. That's again our secret sauce. There are other companies of course that have filter-based solutions for outdoor air. Most of them are limited by area of coverage. No one comes close to us in terms of area of coverage, efficiency in terms of improving air quality or being able to do so at the lowest cost per square foot.
00:46:10
Speaker
Yeah, I mean filter base wouldn't solve the problem of say, you know, like Delhi has that crop burning related pollution. There's no filtration which can solve that unless you're like doing just for indoors. Yeah, filters are fine for indoors and small spaces indoors. But yes, not for outdoors, definitely any kind of and you know, most of these filters don't work when they're wet.
00:46:33
Speaker
That's, it's gonna rain, right? So that's the problem. I've also seen some of these filter-based systems get knocked over in the wind and some of them are so poorly designed that they actually make air pollution worse. This kind of technology is not a cut and paste. You really have to think it through. It has to be intelligent technology.
00:46:57
Speaker
What are the limitations of your system? Does it work in rain also? Yes, it does work in rain. No technology will do everything. Our focus is on the microscopic particles. We found that when we apply the pulse to radio waves, it only works on particle sizes of less than 20 microns. Now in comparison,
00:47:16
Speaker
a piece of fine beach sand, one grain of sand is about 90 microns. So we're not able to affect anything large. So that means that let's say if there is a dust storm, you know, like the dust storms that come through Delhi once in a while, we would not affect the dust from the dust storm. If it was a volcano explosion, we would not affect the volcanic ash.
00:47:40
Speaker
we would reduce the PM10 in 2.5 but nothing is visible. And the good news is those large dust particles for the most part are filtered out in the upper airways anyway, most of it, not all but most of it. And so it's really the microscopic particles. So what we focus on PM10 in 2.5 that are the most dangerous from a health standpoint,
00:48:02
Speaker
The other thing is that what we're doing is we're just speeding up what happens in nature. So it takes a while, especially outdoors, maybe a week or more for the effect to be seen. So ours is not a solution for emergency situations. So remember last year in the city of Visag in Andhra Pradesh in India, there was a gas leak that unfortunately killed many people. That is an emergency situation and our technology would have no role.
00:48:29
Speaker
in those kind of situations. So what about for the crop burning pollution in Delhi? I mean, I've lived many years there, so that's an issue close to my heart.
00:48:41
Speaker
Yes, yes. Now, obviously, even though we are a technology solution, we always, always say the first step is to reduce pollution at the source. That's like number one through 10. So you reduce crop burning, you improve solid waste management, so there's less burning of garbage. You improve, say, vehicle efficiency, your corporate average fuel economy standards. For example, you switch to cleaner burning fuels, which has happened recently with the switch to
00:49:11
Speaker
about a stage six fuels in most cities, for example, or BS six cars. That's great. You encourage a transition to mass transit or bicycles, electric vehicles, renewable energies. All those things are important. And that's like one through 10 on the list, if not even more than that. But sometimes there's still a need for technology and that's where our solution can play a role.
00:49:38
Speaker
we wish it weren't always so, but sometimes it is required. And that is when these kind of technologies can be used. But the first step is always is reduced pollution at the source. But hypothetically, what would be, say, you know, like if there's a corporate which has an office in Sinoida, which gets a lot of this crop burning pollution. So hypothetically, what would be the impact if they were to install this, like during those
00:50:06
Speaker
a couple of weeks? Sure, we've actually tried this. We've done a couple of marathons in Delhi, for example, during the crop burning season, typically after the Dashera festival in India, which is around the mid to latter part of October. And crop burning is usually at its peak. And in these settings, we found that we've been able to improve ambient air quality by anywhere from 35 to about 50, 60%.
00:50:35
Speaker
in these series whether it's PM2.5 or PM10. PM2.5 is a smaller particle so the magnitude of reduction is a bit more compared to PM10 which is a larger particle. So this air comes in from Punjab. Wouldn't that make it impossible to make any impact? I mean whatever air you clean in that area would
00:50:59
Speaker
Just move on and more pollution will come in. So what's happened is our systems have gotten smarter over time. And so we're able to incorporate data like wind speed and wind direction, temperature and humidity.
00:51:16
Speaker
We look at traffic from Google Maps, for example, traffic density from Google Maps. If it's at a customer's industrial site, we look at how many shifts do you have per day? Two shifts or three shifts? And how many workers do you have? And we even get into details like, oh, you're doing welding. Well, welding is very toxic smoke. What kind of welding wire?
00:51:37
Speaker
Are you using? Is it manganese? Is it copper? And how many kilograms per day? So we put all of this data and we get crop burning data from NASA. We look at any other sources of pollution that may be next to that upwind from that customer site. And then we feed this into our system to optimize how every machine works. And the beauty is that every single machine can be operated independently.
00:52:01
Speaker
So a machine that's closer to the main road where pollution is more would work differently than the one that's say next to the park, say in an office IT park setting or something like that. So it's really lovely and it works very, very effectively. Can you talk about the different modes? Like, you know, as you said that machines in different scenarios would work differently. Like what are the modes? Is it like a
00:52:27
Speaker
high intensity mode, low intensity model. You know, we have to cover for things that can affect pollution levels. And the easiest ones to understand would be temperature and humidity, because these all affect the pollution levels that are present. And according to that, we have different types of pulses that we use. If PM10 is high, we work this way. If PM2.5 is high, we use a different pulse sequence. There are about a dozen or so that we use.
00:52:55
Speaker
and that we operate according to that. And everything is controlled through IOT. So even during the lockdowns, for example, we had 100% uptime of all of our systems as long as power was available. And the power is hardly like 20.
00:53:11
Speaker
watts or so. It's just like two or three LED bulbs. It's not very much. Our later units this year will all be solar powered for outdoor use, and we're really excited about that. Yeah, so it's very simple and easy to work with. But remember again, we've had 13 years to do this and figure out a lot of the kinks and bucks and work them out.
00:53:30
Speaker
So how much would it cost for let's say a two acre campus like the subscription cost? Yeah, it's not much actually. The subscription model generally runs about for the smaller areas, it runs for about 10 to 14,000 rupees a month.
00:53:49
Speaker
uh per acre for clean air for outdoors and then for indoors depending on the size it can be let's say one and a half rupee or two rupees less than two rupees a month per square foot per month or much less of course you know it's like slabs for electricity the
00:54:05
Speaker
But the more you the larger the area, the lower the price because it becomes easier for us to set up for large areas. So actually, we've made it quite cost efficient and we found the feedback from our customers on the subscription model has been quite good. So there's this is like an example of innovation and business models, right? The subscription plan, but it's not SAS.
00:54:26
Speaker
Remember, it's software-enabled hardware that we are using, software-enabled hardware. That's what we're providing. So it's not SaaS. It's not lighting as a service, which is a pure hardware solution. It's in between. Got it. Got it. OK. So what do you think would be your constraints to growth? Would it be supply or would it be demand? Do you feel that?
00:54:51
Speaker
You will be able to sell whatever you can produce and it's production you need to figure out or is it that you need to do a lot of evangelism and Get people to buy and you know, what is like a bigger constraint to growth? Mm-hmm. I think the biggest constraint to growth is us That is meaning What's our vision right? Do we want to be a hundred core company?
00:55:17
Speaker
Do we want to be a 500-core company? Do we want to be a 5,000-core company? That's our biggest constraint. And it's like when I talk to my sales team, I say, when you go to a customer, go with the attitude that you've already closed the sale.
00:55:32
Speaker
Because that will give you the confidence to make it so. It's about self-confidence. And the same thing is true here. We have a great technology for air. Now, interestingly, the same technology is very effective in cleaning up pollution and water.
00:55:48
Speaker
And we're not the first to come up with pulsed radio waves for cleaning up pollution. The first patent for this was actually in 1990, pulsed radio waves to clean up pollutants in water, generally from industries. And what they found was that it works really good in cleaning up pollutants in those days. But the problem was that the pulsed radio sequences they used were so crude, the electricity requirements were very high and it just became economically too costly.
00:56:17
Speaker
to use that and so it gave way to other technologies that came later on but pulse radio waves and water works really well and we've been able to simplify it and so there are a lot of things you know that will come out from this right now for example we are working with we've just started in the early stages working with NASA we're invited to collaborate with them because they are asking the question of look when we send a spacecraft to the surface of the moon
NASA Collaboration
00:56:46
Speaker
OK? Then when the spacecraft lands or when the astronaut walks on the surface, it kicks up lunar dust. And that lunar dust is the remnants of old asteroids and meteors from millennia, or actually hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago. But there is no atmosphere on the moon. So that dust has not weathered. It's very abrasive. And NASA folks are telling us that it's actually scratched
00:57:13
Speaker
dome of the face dome of the astronaut suits, its damaged equipment. And remember the ISRO craft that failed recently? Part of the failure was because of the same lunar dust that gets kicked up. So it can be very problematic. NASA is trying out different technologies and they want to look at whether
00:57:32
Speaker
host radio waves can be useful in this setting. Of course we don't know, we have to test it out and everything that we do has to be backed by scientific data and so we're really looking forward to this. The interesting challenge here is to make it very lightweight because when we're sending something up into space every gram counts and we have to make it really lightweight. It can't be 20 kgs like it is right now, it's got to be like 250 grams or something. I don't know how much but it's got to be very
00:58:02
Speaker
Lightweight but very robust for the environment that you would see on the surface of them That's really fun. And and so when we say the sky is a limit. I mean, we're really not kidding, you know Yeah So what stops you from covering 50% of a city like Bangalore? Yeah, like, you know, I think it's just time. It's just time every new technology takes time to be accepted and and again, we are not looking to
00:58:32
Speaker
be a solution without reducing pollution at the source. That's not our interest. Always, always, always first reduce pollution at the source. Do a proper source apportionment study. That means that scientists will understand where is the pollution coming from for a city like Bangor, Delhi.
00:58:50
Speaker
so they'll understand that say 25 or 30 percent comes from the transportation sector, another certain amount comes from this source, and then they can take scientific data-driven policy measures to reduce that pollution. Now, if that's not enough, then there is a role for technology, but our first preference always will be to reduce pollution at the source. Are you currently working with any state-level government to
00:59:18
Speaker
We are looking and we have a number of collaborations. Of course, COVID has slowed those things down, but we look forward to working with them because we find that many of the policymakers want to do something, but they are looking at the
00:59:36
Speaker
these things that I just mentioned, even like, say, improving solid waste management, it's so important to have, you know, good solid waste management so that people don't set fire to rubbish. But then they also recognize that during certain seasons, like crop burning season in Delhi, or not just Delhi, but the entire Gangetic Plain, that we need something else during those intense periods. Another example might be
01:00:02
Speaker
Think for example the California crop fires the wildlife wildfires that started last year that have been happening for the last two years that's another example where It's not really an issue about having say cleaner burning fuels or more electric vehicles on the road This is something else entirely and technology can play a role in minimizing the risk to health from those kind of events Okay, okay, we got it. No, okay and
01:00:30
Speaker
You know, do you still stay on the surface high campus or like? No, once we once we finished as a cardiologist, then we moved out. But, you know, the physician in me doesn't quit. And so yes, you know, two days a week, I still read the scans of the heart with them, you know, for a short while each day to keep up my skills. And I enjoy I enjoy working with the physicians there on that.
01:00:57
Speaker
What will be the turnover of DEVIC by the end of this current financial year? Initially, we set our target as 12 crores and that was pre-pandemic before the second wave.
01:01:15
Speaker
We will smash that in the next month or two, and I expect that we should close at least four times that number by the end of the year. I'd like to reach 100, if I've told my VCs, I said, look, once we reach 50 crores, I want you guys to hold my feet to the fire and make us reach 100 crores, right? So, because that's growth, and that just means that people, we have a product that people love,
01:01:42
Speaker
that they find real value in that helps them. And our data shows that our customers typically see improvements in air quality by more than half. And their sick leaves, that is, their sick leaves from their employees actually reduce by 11% because their employees are breathing cleaner air. And that's a tangible difference.
01:02:04
Speaker
Right, right. And how do you handle the manufacturing? You have like a plant? Yeah, we do everything ourselves. We do everything ourselves. You have a plant in Bangalore? Yes, yes. And luckily for us, we have the opportunity to scale up so we can handle larger order sizes as they come in. Beyond Campus is a production of the podium.in powered by Career Launcher.
01:02:30
Speaker
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