We live in a country where solutions often arrive after the problem has gotten out of hand. Where clean air feels like a luxury, and waste – particularly plastic – just seems to pile up endlessly, as if we’re all hoping someone, somewhere will magically make it disappear. At the recently held InnoWin Day hosted by the Marico Innovation Foundation, I met two such entrepreneurial wizards – people not just figuring out an innovative solution to a serious problem, but building entire companies to do just that.
Meet Angad Daryani, founder of Praan Inc, and Sandip Singh, co-founder of Ishitva Robotic Systems. One’s reclaiming polluted air, the other’s rescuing recyclable plastic from oblivion. And they’re both doing it with a wild sense of purpose, and a clever application of AI.
InnoWin Day wasn’t your usual startup gala with PowerPoint pitches and politely exchanged LinkedIn requests. It felt more like a matchmaking exercise for India’s most pressing challenges and those stubborn enough to build solutions for them. Climate resilience, plastic waste, agri-tech – the themes presented enormous challenges, but the 24 innovators in the room all claimed to have what it takes to solve them. That’s where I ran into Angad and Sandip. Their companies aren’t exactly household names, but the problems they’re tackling couldn’t be more urgent.
Angad Daryani speaks in rapid-fire optimism – the kind that comes from building your first robot before most kids get their first smartphone. But beneath that enthusiasm is a deeper urgency.
Angad grew up in Mumbai, a city where air quality often veers into the hazardous. His struggles with asthma weren’t just a personal challenge, they were the spark. His company, Praan Inc, is his answer.
Based in Mumbai and San Francisco, Praan is building filterless air purification systems for industrial and commercial spaces. No replaceable filters. No long-term maintenance. Just physics, engineering, and a bit of software magic. “Across all our products, we use AI all the time,” Angad tells me. But it’s not AI for AI’s sake. Take their industrial business, for instance.
Traditionally, deploying air purification equipment in factories required site visits, measurements, custom plans – often over weeks or months. Praan found that too slow. So they built a wearable computer vision system that lets technicians – often not engineers, mind you – scan dusty, chaotic factory floors and generate precise digital twins.
Also read: How Praan is helping fix India’s air pollution problem
“It uses its neural net to figure out what different shapes are… It recreates welded spots or irregular surfaces as-is.” Angad says, adding: “What used to take a traditional company one to six months, Praan does in 24 hours.”
And that’s just the industrial side. Their consumer product, Hive, brings that same thinking into homes and offices. It doesn’t just clean air – it talks to you.
“It scans your room, detects your fan, window, door… if CO₂ is high, it’ll say ‘open the window to your left.’” Angad grins. “It feels like talking to an AI. But it’s practical AI. Helpful AI.”
You don’t often hear people talk about air quality with joy. But Angad does. When Hive tells users their indoor air is “as good as Switzerland today,” it’s more than data and utility. And people are responding. “We have a 42% weekly open rate on the Hive app,” he notes, a statistic most consumer apps would kill for.
But Praan isn’t just a feel-good India story. It’s quietly going global. “Build it here, but ship it for the world,” Angad says. “Right now we sell Hive in the Middle East, the US, even Portugal. We just signed a distributor in Oman.” His message to Indian founders? Aim wider. “India is a great launchpad for deep tech. But don’t stop at solving India. Build global businesses. That’s how you create abundant opportunities.”
If Angad is air, Sandip Singh is earth. Specifically, the 6,000 tonnes of plastic waste India generates every day – most of it mixed, dirty, and destined for landfills or worse, open fires.
Sandip and his team at Ishitva Robotic Systems, based in Ahmedabad, are using AI and robotics to intercept that fate. “Many of the real-world problems – you can’t solve them sitting in an air-conditioned room,” he tells me. “You need to come out, go near the problem, understand it, and create an appropriate solution.”
For Ishitva, that meant building machines that could not just sort waste, but understand it. Their AI-powered air sorting machine, SUKA, and robotic sorter, YUTA. Powered by their proprietary algorithm ishitvAI, Ishitva’s systems can process up to 6 tonnes of dry waste per hour – identifying plastics by polymer type, even under dusty, grimy, real-world conditions.
“Plastic waste is a global problem. What makes it harder is that it’s mixed. To really recycle it, you have to segregate it down to the polymer. That’s incredibly hard. But AI makes it possible.”
And that’s the thing. Ishitva’s work shows that automation might be the key – not just for scale, but for dignity of labour – especially in India’s waste management sector. Manual waste sorting is dangerous, thankless, and deeply inefficient.
Sandip doesn’t romanticize it. He’s not pitching Ishitva as a utopian fix. Instead, he frames it for what it is – an opportunity hidden inside inefficiency. “Non-core tech industries have a lot of inefficiency. That’s the opportunity for new-age innovators. It’s a challenge too, because these sectors are slow to adopt. But that’s what makes it interesting,” reiterates Sandip.
Today, Ishitva’s solutions are already being deployed in municipal and private sector waste facilities. Tomorrow, who knows? If the world wants circularity, this might be where it begins – in dusty corners of waste-sorting lines, guided by AI eyes.
As far as InnoWin Day goes, events like these can often feel performative – a chorus of applause and best-of-luck handshakes. “Innovation thrives through collaboration,” said Marico’s Harsh Mariwala during the keynote, as I recall. And that starts with simply listening to people closest to the problem, who are trying to change the world for the better with ingenuity, AI and stubborn hope.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not always fast. But in the hands of folks like Angad and Sandip, it’s definitely real.
Also read: IIT Madras Carbon Zero Challenge: Top 6 teams and their tech innovations
