Step into a big Indian office, a mall or a multiplex on a hazy November afternoon and the air inside feels clean. It often is not. Indoor air can be three to five times more polluted than the air outside, and the machines already moving that air — the building’s central air conditioners — have always just cooled it and sent it back. Clairco, a Bengaluru startup, looked at those same machines and saw something else: a purification system waiting to be switched on.
The company’s answer is disarmingly simple. Instead of asking a building to buy a fleet of standalone purifiers, Clairco fits low-drag nano filters into the air conditioning the building already owns. The AC keeps cooling exactly as before, and as it moves air through the building it cleans it too — a retrofit that turns the most ordinary machine in the building into the one that protects everyone breathing inside it.
A father’s hospital visit, and a question about air conditioners
Clairco began with a family scare. In September 2017, founder Aayush Jha’s father, a government employee transferred from Bhilai to Delhi, was rushed to hospital with chest pain; doctors told the family that severe air pollution had taken a toll on his lungs. Aayush, a lawyer with startup experience, flew up from Bengaluru and bought the family an air purifier for their Ghaziabad home — then discovered that one box could not fix the air of a whole flat.
Curious, he took a purifier apart and found little more than a fan pulling air through a filter. Air conditioners, he realised, do the same job at a far bigger scale — they already move enormous volumes of air. What if an AC could clean the air while it cooled the room? That question became Clairco, short for Clean Air Company, founded in 2018. Aayush spent his own savings building the first prototype, raised Rs 50 lakh from AngelList investors in May 2019, and had a finished product ready by January 2020.
A filter that lets the AC breathe
The heart of the system is a low-drag nano filter designed to slot into existing central air conditioning without making the machine work harder. Thick filters choke airflow and force an AC to strain; Clairco’s filters are built to let air pass freely, so cooling performance stays exactly as it was. The filtration meets the MERV-13 grade the company cites, keeping PM10 and PM2.5 in check, and the company says particulate levels inside its buildings run about 90 per cent lower than the air outside.
Filtration is only one layer. Clairco’s systems add ultraviolet germicidal irradiation inside the air handling units to deal with microbes, and treated fresh air to manage carbon dioxide and volatile organic compounds. Its sensiAIR monitors watch the air around the clock, tracking particulate matter, CO2 and VOCs in real time, and the data tells the team exactly when a filter needs changing — so clean air is measured, not assumed.
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Clean air as a service — and cheaper cooling too
What makes Clairco’s model sing is that nobody has to buy anything. The company installs and maintains everything itself and charges a monthly fee — clean air as a service, with zero capital expenditure for the building. And it backs the promise with its wallet: the company says it will not charge for any period when the promised air quality is not delivered.
The economics are the reason building owners listen. Purifying a 3,00,000-square-foot office the conventional way can cost around Rs 2 crore; Clairco’s retrofit does the same job for about Rs 3 lakh, the company says — roughly a hundredth of the cost. The same IoT systems that watch the air also trim the energy bill: Clairco’s technology cuts cooling energy use by up to 35 per cent, and NASSCOM, which named Clairco among its Emerge 50 winners in 2023, notes energy savings of 15 to 18 per cent alongside WHO-standard air quality.
From nine clients to 17 million square feet
The idea has travelled fast. After early backing from AngelList, Clairco raised Rs 4.2 crore in an angel round in March 2021 led by Sanjiv Bajaj, and the client list now reads like a roll call of India’s biggest landlords and employers — Brigade, WeWork, Emaar, Brookfield, CapitaLand and the Max Group among them, with the company’s own site also showing JLL, Visa, CBRE and Cognizant. Today Clairco’s systems cover more than 17 million square feet across over 35 clients, and NASSCOM credits the company with saving some 22,500 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year.
It is a quietly radical kind of Indian engineering: no gleaming new machine to buy, no building torn apart for a retrofit — just a smarter filter, a few sensors and the air conditioner that was already there, working twice as hard for the people inside. In a country where the air outside makes headlines every winter, Clairco is making the air inside worth breathing — one AC at a time.
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