Delhi’s air quality slipped into the ‘severe’ zone and remained there for days after Diwali, as firecracker fumes mixed with cold winter stagnation — an annual pattern that sent purifier and mask sales surging on Amazon and Flipkart.
Amazon reported a 5x jump in air purifiers across regions and a 20x spike in Delhi-NCR, with premium models growing over 150% year-on-year. Flipkart saw Delhi-NCR purifier demand rise 8x in early November, while its quick-commerce arm logged nearly a 12x jump. Quick-commerce platforms echoed the trend, with Instamart seeing close to a 10x surge in purifiers and N95 masks, led overwhelmingly by North India, Mint reported last week.
That surge in consumer demand is now spilling over to specialised climate-tech startups, many of which are carving out narrow verticals within the broader clean-air market.
Startups tap niche categories
Among the brands riding this demand wave is Hero group–backed Qubo, whose smart purifiers range from ₹8,000 to ₹20,000, with an average selling price of roughly ₹10,000.
The company says it has already sold 30,000+ units this financial year and expects to close FY25 at around 50,000 units, fuelled by what it calls a “very big uptick” post-Diwali. Its car purifiers — a niche segment gaining fast traction in NCR — are now moving about 100 units a day, or roughly 3,000 a month.
The company relies on filter replacements for recurring monetisation and nudges customers through automated alerts when filters need to be cleaned or replaced, said Nitin Dua, co-founder at Qubo by Hero Electronix.
For Karban Envirotech, vertical diversification sits at the product level. Its climate-comfort devices combine a fan, purifier and lighting in one unit — a mix that helps bypass seasonal swings, said founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Karan Bansal. “Purifiers sell in winter; airflow and lighting take over in summer — so the product moves year-round.”
The company sells devices priced between ₹15,000 and ₹30,000, with an average order value of ₹20,000. Recurring monetisation comes from filter replacements, annual maintenance contracts and installation services. Post-Diwali demand has spiked, though Bansal declined to disclose unit numbers.
Karban, which raised $1.07 million last year from Urban Company and Zerodha’s Rainmatter, now plans to raise additional funding to scale its R&D-heavy pipeline, Bansal said.
Wearables and deep-tech players
At the other end of the spectrum is Atovio, a Gurugram-based clean-air startup that is betting on air-purifier wearables even as the broader wearables market dims.
A wearable air purifier is a device that creates a personal clean-air zone.
The company says it has sold around 18,000 units since launching in late 2024, each priced at ₹3,500. The business is almost entirely hardware-led with no recurring revenue, but demand has spiked.
“The uptake after September has been massive… Last week’s numbers were about 50x of the first week of September,” Atovio’s co-founder Anmay Shahlot said.
Currently bootstrapped — supported only by a ₹25 lakh Startup India Seed Fund grant — Atovio says it is deliberately avoiding external capital: “We are trying to keep it bootstrapped as long as we can,” he said.
San Francisco–based Praan represents a deeper-tech play within the clean-air space. The company began with filterless, industrial-grade purification systems deployed across factories, with far harsher particulate loads than cities, including Tata Steel, Pidilite, Nestlé, Berger Paints and others.
Praan has now pivoted toward homes and offices this year. The shift is showing traction: about 150 units were sold this month alone, matching all of last year’s 144 sales, with roughly 1,000 devices produced and shipped this year. The product currently sells at an average price of ₹60,000, with plans to bring it down to ₹30,000 next year, as the company aims to raise more capital, said Angad Daryani, founder and CEO at Praan.
“In India it’s a hardware sale; the recurring is the maintenance of the device one to four times a year,” said Daryani, adding that Delhi-NCR customers sit at the higher end of that maintenance cycle. Overseas, however, the model flips: “In the US, you don’t buy devices… it’s a utility. You pay a monthly fee.”
Praan’s roots lie abroad partly because Indian venture capital was hard to access. The company developed US backing after Daryani “couldn’t raise money for 24 months” in India, as “no one would cut us a cheque here”.
Funding gap persists
Despite the surge in demand, venture investment in climate tech remains thin. Founders argue that subscription-style revenues from filters and servicing give today’s hardware-led climate-response startups stronger repeatability than earlier cycles — but challenges persist.
“There are around 800 viable climate-tech startups in India, but less than 3% have raised Series B or beyond — it’s a serious scaling gap,” said Sumanta Biswas, assistant director at CUTS International, a policy research and advocacy group.
Large upfront capital, long regulatory lead-times and dependence on government adoption “keep many VCs wary,” Biswas said. “Mitigation demands patient capital; adaptation offers short payback cycles and clear business models.”
As broader categories mature, Biswas expects sharper segmentation: “Entrepreneurs will move into micro-segments — hyperlocal climate services, personal air-tech, neighbourhood-level clean-air solutions. Such verticals offer lean models, faster traction and clear ROI (return on investment).”
As pollution season hardens into a predictable business cycle, climate-tech’s near-term future is being shaped less by long-horizon prevention bets and more by adaptation products that offer sellable, short-cycle monetisation.
