There are over 25 million asthma sufferers and over 80 million allergy sufferers in the United States alone. This creates a large group of people that are all hyper-aware of the air they breathe. Although they may not refer to the air they breath in the technical terms that the air purification industry speaks about, these people do talk about mold and bacteria. It is a very important topic. Today, air quality and airborne illness, Covid-19, are at the forefront of people’s mind.

Jaya Rao, CEO and Co-Founder of Molekule, joins host Justin Starbird for the latest episode of Inspiring Minds to talk about what led to the founding of such a game changing company.

Jaya’s brother is a life long allergy and asthma sufferer and “He lived it and so we knew he was feeling it (the poor air quality) and a whole bunch of other people were feeling the pain of breathing dirty air, and that we could meet them there and talk about how we’re different.” Jaya’s father had developed a technology that could purify the air right in your home instead of through an HVAC system in the ducts of your home.

The next challenge was, “Okay, you’ve had filtration for years. Here’s something new. Would you want to try it?”

“A lot of times aesthetically, people end up using it (the product) and then throwing it on the side of the road because they’re done with it and throwing it into the trash. We wanted this (the Molekule Air) to be an object that really felt compelling to you, that you felt like it belongs in your home, it belongs as a centerpiece in your home because it’s doing something important. It’s cleaning your air.”

I think the biggest step was trying to come up with something fundamentally different in the way it looked, and then getting that manufactured and finding partners. We took it one step at a time but now as I look back at it, I just think, “I don’t know how we did it with, at that time, a really small team.” I think it was just we were naive maybe to the challenges ahead and we just kept going. Ultimately got the product out, which at the time, a lot of Silicon Valley hardware companies were not able to do. That was really just a big moment to finally arrive at.

Today, Molekule is a multi-Edison Award Winning Company and forever part of the Edison Awards amazing community. Listen to the full interview with Justin and Jaya now!