Why I Take Air Personally

Hi, my name is Abhinav Gupta, and I'm the founder and CEO of Breethr. At Breethr we take air personally. And we're excited to introduce Breethr P1, our first personal climate system for homes. It's a product that means an enormous amount to me, and the culmination of years of work.

This is the story of why we take air personally, why you should do too, and why the Breethr P1 is the first device that truly personalizes your air.

I grew up in Mumbai in the 1990s. I’d always been fascinated by science and the environment. I watched Captain Planet, joined nature clubs, worried about the ozone layer, and wondered how technology could make the planet a better place.

I also loved building things. In my first year of engineering college, a friend and I built a solar-powered LED streetlight. We were selected to demonstrate our invention to Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, the former President of India. I still have photographs from that day. Those photos remain among my proudest possessions.

I knew I wanted to use engineering to solve environmental problems. I just didn't know which ones. Then, in 2013. I was working on energy-monitoring technology when a mentor asked me a question that would change the course of my life.

If I was so good at building sensors, why wasn't I measuring air?

It was an extraordinary idea. We were surrounded by air, depended on it every moment of our lives, and yet knew remarkably little about the air we were actually breathing.

I couldn't stop thinking about it.

By 2016, I had committed myself to air-quality monitoring. I built sensors, collected data, studied pollution, and began working with businesses to understand their indoor environments. I became the guy who carried an air-quality sensor everywhere.

Then, during the COVID pandemic, one of India's leading professional cricket teams was preparing to spend a season inside a secure COVID bubble. They asked me to evaluate some of Mumbai's finest luxury hotels and recommend the one with the best air quality for their players.

What I discovered shocked me. Hotel after hotel, my sensors recorded air-quality readings I considered unacceptable. These were establishments that could offer their guests almost any luxury imaginable. Yet I couldn't confidently recommend their air to professional athletes. Frankly, I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.

In the middle of the night, I received a call from a senior figure associated with the team. He wanted the players to stay at a particular hotel, rather than the one I had recommended.

Could we make the air good enough?

Yes, I told him. But it would take some work. And so we set to work. We monitored the air of around 200 rooms continuously, installed purifiers, managed humidity, introduced fresh air, adjusted filtration, and deployed different machines to solve different problems.

All this, just to make the air in a five-star hotel good enough to breathe in.

That experience brought home something I had been thinking about for years.

The problem wasn't about sensing anymore. We knew how to measure air. The problem was what to do about it.

For over a century, air conditioning has been our principal answer to managing indoor air. But conventional air conditioning was primarily designed around temperature. What about humidity, pollutants, carbon dioxide, ventilation, and everything else that determines the quality of the air we breathe?

We had somehow accepted that each of these problems required another machine. Another appliance. Another solution.

But air doesn't work that way. Air is one environment. Why weren't we treating it as such?

I also realized that the problem went beyond engineering. We obsess over the food we eat, the water we drink, the mattresses we sleep on, and countless little choices that make our lives better. Yet we rarely give the same thought to the air we breathe every second of every day.

We simply don't take air personally enough.

I wanted to change that. I began imagining a single intelligent system that could measure and manage all the important qualities of air together. A system that could cool, heat, purify, ventilate, and manage humidity, while adapting to the people breathing that air.

That idea became Breethr.

With my co-founder Manav and a team of engineers, we began building systems for businesses, schools, hospitals, and commercial spaces. These evolved into our Breethr XL commercial systems, allowing us to develop and refine the technology in real environments.

Today, Breethr manages the air in over one million cubic metres of inhabited space around the world. That's a volume approaching the enclosed space of Houston's Astrodome. Every day, people live, work, and breathe in spaces powered by our technology.

I'm immensely proud of what we've built. But I've always believed this technology belongs in people's homes.

And bringing it home meant rethinking everything. I didn't want another anonymous white box hanging on a wall. I wanted something beautiful, something people would love having in their homes, something they could install themselves, and something that would finally allow everyone to personalize their air.

That is why we built Breethr P1.

P1 is the culmination of a lifetime spent thinking about the environment, and more than a decade devoted to deeply understanding air.

It brings everything we've learned about sensing, conditioning, purifying, and personalizing air into one beautifully engineered personal climate system. We believe it is the finest device of its kind anywhere in the world.

We're now beginning our global launch, starting with customers in the United States and India, before expanding to the rest of the world. I couldn't be more excited to bring this technology into people's homes.

I began this journey because I wanted to understand the air we breathe. Today, I want to give everyone the power to make that air their own.