Uravu Labs, a start-up that has developed a revolutionary method to generate clean drinking water from the air. The process they are have implemented is “Uravu Atmospheric Water Generator,” uses a technology known as atmospheric water harvesting (AWH) to extract water from the moisture in the air. This water renewable technology uses clean and constant source of energy from the Sun, and carbon neutral sources of waste heat and biomass is also used. During this process not a drop of water is wasted.
Co-founder and CEO, Uravu Labs, Pradeep Garg said, “It will further enable us to mitigate resource depletion by converting abundantly available air into water using only renewable energy. With field pilots already out, the company is aiming to rapidly test and scale the solution with key customers.”
Bengaluru based, Uravu Labs was founded in 2019 by Govinda Balaji, Venkatesh R, Swapnil Shrivastav and Pradeep Garg. Currently the company has installed a capacity of 1,000 litres a day. The startup aims to grow this number to 1 Lakh litres a day in the coming 24 months. So far Uravu Labs has raised about $4 million and is being backed by several investors such as Speciale Invest, JITO Angel Network and Anicut Capital.
Both Swapnil and Venkatesh are graduates of NIT (Calicut) and were experiencing water shortage that too in a coastal region. After which it clicked that they should work on the problem. In the year 2016, they started to do research on water from air concept. By 2017, they had developed an electricity based conventional AWG (atmospheric water generator). However, with this method a lot of electricity was being consumed it was viable enough.
In the year 2019, both Swapnil and Venkatesh decided to create something which is 100 percent renewable. Pradeep Garge, a PhD holder, part of the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru was part of a research team in Massachusetts in (MIT) and with the help of his background and knowledge the team started to work on the project.
The startup has managed to develop a renewable water technology which uses the moisture present in the air to extract drinking water from it. By using liquid desiccants to absorb moisture and recovering the moisture which is absorbed in order to create freshwater using renewable energy sources including solar, biomass and waste heat.
As the world’s population continues to grow, access to clean drinking water is becoming an increasingly urgent issue. With their revolutionary atmospheric water harvesting technology, Uravu Labs may have found a solution that could help address this critical problem.
