This Bengaluru-based start-up generates water from thin air

In 2016, Swapnil Shrivastav and Venkatesh R.Y., the founders of the Bengaluru-based Uravu Labs, a start-up working on renewable water technology, experienced first-hand the impact of water shortage.

In 2016, Swapnil Shrivastav and Venkatesh R.Y., the founders of the Bengaluru-based Uravu Labs, a start-up working on renewable water technology, experienced first-hand the impact of water shortage.

They were both students at the National Institute of Technology, Calicut, back then, says Shrivastav, recalling the dry spell the city of Kozhikode went through that year. When the river near the institute, its primary source of water, started drying up, NIT turned to water tankers to supply their staff and students with water.

“But with so many students in the hostel, you cannot keep calling water tankers,” says Shrivastav, adding that water had to be rationed to one to two buckets per person per day back then. “That was a trigger. It got me thinking about water, in general.”

They began researching technology that could create water from the air and continued their experiments even after they graduated, and took up a job. These initial prototypes used refrigerants to help condense atmospheric water, a technology similar to that employed in air conditioners.

However, this was neither very efficient nor very sustainable, pointed out Shrivastav. “We thought we would continue doing this and see where it goes,” he said, adding that they did this part-time for a while, convincing their landlord to let them experiment in the area surrounding their rented accommodation in Bengaluru.

By 2018, they had changed their technology, using desiccants, substances that are capable of absorbing water from the air, instead of refrigerants. “We wanted to look at something not dependent on electricity,” he says, adding that they began using silica gel to trap moisture in the air. This moisture, in turn, gets desorbed using heat generated from a renewable energy source, and the water vapour released is condensed and then collected.

Around the same time, Tata Group-backed Water Abundance XPRIZE, a global contest offering a considerable grant to teams that could successfully create low-cost, energy-efficient technologies that could help alleviate the looming global water crisis. When they won the XPrize Grant, the duo quit their day jobs and decided to do this full-time, going on to add two members to the team-- Govinda Balaji and Pradeep Garg. In October 2019, the four came together and found Uravu Labs, the name was inspired by the Malayalam word for “spring of water.”