When he was a baby, Dilip Goswami, suffered from asthma and allergies. After 20 years of work, his father, University of Florida mechanical engineer and veteran energy researcher, Yogi Goswami, built a prototype of an of an air purifier that could relieve Dilip's symptoms.
It also formed the basis of Molekule, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2014 of which Dilip is cofounder and CEO, that's taking on Honeywell and Dyson in the $33 billion air filter market.
Since launching in May 2016, Molekule has been working hard to make enough of its air purifiers to keep up with demand. Its $799 product (annual air filter subscriptions go for $129) had sold out seven times by September 2018, according to Fast Company.
Molekule works better than standard high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters which were invented in the 1940s. As Fast Company wrote
Molekule is the world’s first air purifier that destroys pollutants at the molecular level. Its process, called photoelectrochemical oxidation (PECO), involves shining light onto a filter membrane that has been coated with proprietary nanoparticles, triggering a reaction that breaks down pollutants of any size, including allergens, mold, bacteria, viruses, and carcinogenic volatile organic compounds that concentrate in indoor air.
Molekule's product also helped Jaya Rao, Yogi Goswamis' daughter who is the company's cofounder and COO. As Rao told me in a September 11 interview, "I moved to Tampa and suffered from migraine headaches. I used the prototype my father had developed and a week later my headaches went away."
Molekule was helping people in California affected by wildfire smoke this summer. Moreover, in August 2018, the company saw a market opportunity in reaching the 80 million Americans with allergies and the 25 million asthma sufferers, according to the San Francisco Business Journal.
My math -- I multiplied the total number of allergy and asthma sufferers by Molekule's prices -- suggests that these two groups of customers represent a total addressable market of $83.9 billion in air purifiers and another $13.5 billion in filters.
Molekule -- which has raised $13.4 million in capital, according to Crunchbase -- began shipping the product in July 2017. As Rao said, "We've sold tens of thousands of the devices -- more than we originally imagined. We've grown from 11 people to 72 in order to meet demand for the product which we sell directly to the consumer. We manufacture through a partnership with Foxconn in China."
Molekule's 72 people are organized by function and collaboration across these functions is crucial. As Rao explained,
We were mission driven from our earliest days. We sit in the interviews with every new hire. And we want to create teams of scientists that collaborate with each other. Dilip and I are siblings who collaborate -- which is good and bad. But we fill in the gaps. Dilip started working on the core technology -- he is deeper into the technology and is continuously innovating. I communicate with customers because the scientists have trouble getting across the benefits of the product to customers. We have leaders for each of our functions -- manufacturing, engineering, R&D, marketing, and customer service. We want to have a flow of value and information across the functions. We need everyone to collaborate because it leads to better outcomes.
Honeywell and Dyson are both huge public companies but they don't break out their air purifier revenues. My guess is that if either of these companies acquired Molekule, they would have the capital, manufacturing scale, and distribution clout to massively increase sales of its air purifiers.
