While in talks with potential partnerships, Indonesia-based Nafas has seen a unique situation pop up with some prospective clients. Before allotting tenders, businesses often have to sift through pitch decks of the health and wellness firm’s competitors. But these clients say they can’t find competitors that offer the same things as it does.

Nafas is building an ecosystem with different components to combat the impact of air pollution, including making smart devices like air purifiers and pollution sensors. It’s now rolling out subscriptions for “clean air as a service” for businesses.

These are stepping stones to other plans. “We are in the process of mapping health outcomes against air quality events such as pollution spikes,” says Piotr Jakubowski, co-founder and chief growth officer at Nafas and former chief marketing officer at Gojek. “There’s a high and direct correlation between increase in air pollution and increases in complaints around multiple respiratory diseases.”

Nafas founders Nathan Roestandy (left) and Piotr Jakubowski / Photo credit: Nafas

The company hopes to personalize this data to build a user’s health profile. By studying an individual’s exposure to air pollutants, Nafas hopes to predict the onset of health-related episodes, including asthma spells, by tracking spikes in air pollution.

Risks of getting lung cancer, cardiovascular disease, and respiratory illness, as well as a person’s skin health – correlations for all of these can be made by studying an individual’s exposure to air pollution, adds Nathan Roestandy, the startup’s co-founder and CEO.

Nafas, which translates into “breath” in Bahasa and Arabic, previously raised US$1.3 million in a pre-seed round. It’s now in the process of securing seed funding.

Jakubowski and Roestandy were reacquainted when the former was still at Gojek – they went to the same school before. In fact, Gojek co-founder Kevin Aluwi played a role in getting the two together: The ride-hailing firm had previously invested in Zulu, a wearables startup co-founded by Roestandy, in 2018.

Behind clean air as a service

Nafas currently offers two devices: an air quality monitor called AirTest and a purifier called Pure40. It has sold over 2,000 of these devices across Indonesia. It aims to ship out the Pure60, a larger version of the Pure40, soon.

Since 2021, Nafas’ inventory has seen sales to the tune of about half a million dollars. This is despite hiccups that include a pandemic-induced move to relocate the firm’s manufacturing from China to Indonesia as well as the global shortage of semiconductors.

Nafas is rolling out subscriptions for its ‘clean-air-as-a-service’ model. / Photo credit: Nafas

“There was a period of time, about six to eight months, where we couldn’t replenish our inventory,” shares Roestandy. The production of a key component in Nafas’ devices (the firm didn’t go into specifics) was soon discontinued following the semiconductor shortage, leading them to redesign the device around a new microcontroller (a control device that has a microprocessor).

“This was a big step, but I’m glad that we overcame that early on. We have a stronger supply chain now because we are using components that are less susceptible to shortages,” he adds.

A feedback loop

Expansion city by city