Oana CoșmanThe Work in Progress podcast is a Green Start-Up and start-up.ro production focused on the investors and founders that change the startup ecosystem.
We've centered the Work in Progress podcast around two major themes, and were going to split the episodes into the Blue podcast – for start-up.ro – where we'll discuss with venture capital managers, angel investors, startup founders from Romania, Europe and around the world about their role in the ecosystem, business, trends, and the Green podcast – for Green Start-Up – where we will put a sustainability layer on our discussions and we'll approach topics relevant for impact founders as well as impact investors.
Capitalizing on two markets - Air Purification and Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) - Airvolt harnesses the potential of advertising to go beyond communication and actively help monitor and purify the air we breathe. By integrating ads with air quality initiatives, the team behind Airvolt strives to create a healthier and more sustainable future for all.
Exposure to poor air quality leads to serious illnesses such as stroke, lung cancer, pneumonia, ischaemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and more. Life expectancy drops by 4+ years in polluted cities. This is the context in which Airvolt comes witha solution and a mission to help cities fight air pollution at low to no cost.
The startup fuses Display Out Of Home and air monitoring & purification technologies to help cities offer cleaner air to breathe.
How does the Airvolt DOOH Network work?
- AI-Driven: CIM, cost-saving, energy efficiency, pollution forecast & more.
- AQ Monitoring: gather real-time air quality data for actionable insights.
- Clean-tech Hardware: raise air quality and property value, at low to no cost.
- Big Data: smart cities achieve better IoT integration and more data points
- Ad-tech: deliver messages to audiences at premium OOH locations.
”We have an opportunity that that can help solve a problem that affects 99.9 percent of the people on this planet which is air that you breathe and the longer that we go without paying real attention to it the harder it's going to come in the next 10 or 15 years. And we have a solution that we can start on today. Is it the solution? I don't know. Is it the best thing that we've seen? Yes it is [...] Are our filters the exact answer for the solution? I will tell you after being in a place for 60 days, 90 days, 120 days and we can actually tell parts per million what the particulates are and what so that's why anybody should be looking to companies like ours. Which is why I try not to use the word clean and I use the word like remediation which means kind of clean up a mess or I use the words like filter because I'm pulling particulates out of the air”.
"My background is in consumer packaged goods, what I've been doing for a little over 30 years started in the music business and moved into into typical consumer packaged goods, things in the luxury space and in the in the consumable space. And after doing that for a long period of time, I wanted to do something that had a greater effect on the world. And I moved into technology and thought leaders and gurus and things of that nature. That's where actually where the CEO and I met. He was running an agency in Romania, I was running an agency in New York City, a little less than a decade ago, probably about eight years ago. And in those conversations, we struck up a friendship. So about two years ago, my phone rang. It was Anton, the CEO, he told me what he was doing in the regenerative tech space. And it was something that was near and dear to me, somebody that is working in that in that area. And I said, Yeah, let's make a go of it and see what we can do".
"What we're doing at Airvolt is Air Remediation. We don't claim that we're going to change the world by fixing air, but we know that in our little spaces that we can interact in that we can make it marketably better, and in making it better, then people have greater opportunities in their lives. In the simplest terms, Airvolt is an interactive opportunity in the environment. So imagine if you would, a kiosk, three meter by three meter tall kiosk, that inside of that, where we're doing our, we'll call it back of housework, which is air remediation and cleaning air".
"Filtrating the air is actually probably the proper work. So you can't really clean air, but filtrating the air. And inside of that, our devices hold sensors that are looking for specific types of particulates. So it can be specific to the environment on which they're in. Not everybody has the same issues when it comes to their air quality. Some people have had different particulates. So from that point, we have sensors. And then our sensors drive filters and the filters act like a, like an air purifier, what they're doing."
"Inside of that kiosk, we ourselves as an outdoor signage company, because most of our units, you will find out in the environment, even though we are working on a second stage, which will be in home, but we're gonna start out of home and out of home signage. So like a bus kiosk that has advertising on it as a digital sign or, you know, a digital billboard that you go by every day is our secondary opportunity and what our offering is so that you can kind of understand if you were at a bus kiosk and you're standing there every morning or afternoon waiting for your transit to get or come from work, that the kiosk that you're standing in could be performing more of a function than you just standing there."
"In our particular case, we're putting in air remediation models because we believe that your right to clean air, particularly as working populous is paramount, very much up there with clean water. So that is our opportunity. We put forth a device that that is filtrating the air as life goes past you. And inside of that, we've bundled some advertising."
"The one device has a little bit larger than a six meter to eight meter radius. It really is about about the micro and then you've had a network together and you have a bit of a macro effect."
"It's a very difficult conversation in today's world. How do you fix something? That's a larger global conversation that we hope to participate in, but that's not really our side of the line. So the side of the line that we're in is how do we make people's lives better as we fix things? It becomes very, very complicated, very fast when you're like, I'm going to fix bad air. Well, did you change the jet stream? Did you change the factory? Do you have all of as opposed to what we can say is that in the areas in which we're operating, we're removing harmful things from the air to a part per million billion conversation."
"Our company goal is to work with corporations and governments and municipalities to help frame the conversation of what we're doing and how this can be beneficial before I start putting toothpaste ads onto our devices."
Any thoughts?