Tag: Director & Founder

Pure Skies, a revolutionary VC backed green-tech system from Devic Earth covers the widest area of any air pollution control system in India

Mumbai, April 21, 2021: Pure Skies is an innovative flagship air pollution control system from Devic Earth, a Bengaluru-based green technology start-up. It uses pulsed Wi-Fi technology to tackle airborne gaseous and particle pollutants in industrial complexes, homes and cities. Available for both indoor and outdoor spaces, Pure Skies is a plug-and-play system. Just pushing a button will help remove 40-50 percent of nano-sized particles at <20µm, including PM2.5 and PM10, from the air you breathe.

With over 40 installations across India, Pure Skies can cover areas as large as hundreds of acres outdoors using a point-to-point network, similar to commercial Wi-Fi systems. Pure Skies improves air quality by as much as 33%, reducing pollutants that damage human health, such as particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and sulfur dioxide (SO2).

In the Pure Skies systems, Wi-Fi network extenders (nodes) repeat the signal from the Wi-Fi source (central base station) and increase its coverage across the entire facility. A network of such nodes serves the purpose of covering large areas with enhanced efficiency.

Devic Earth’s pollution control technology has been adopted by manufacturing conglomerates globally in sectors like steel, cement, hotels, mining, telecom, etc. Pure Skies works equally well for urban bodies and industrial clusters in solving air pollution challenges arising out of crop burning, forest fires, construction, industrial emissions, etc.

Commenting on the development, Dr. Srikanth Sola, Director & Founder, Devic Earth said, “Pure Skies is a state-of-the-art innovative flagship product which helps in tackling air pollution. We are proud to have pioneered the air-purifying revolution with our green technology and helping create a better environment to live and work in. Being a cardiologist by profession, I understand the importance of breathing clean air. Thanks to our robust R&D, we can provide enhanced air quality with real time monitoring to our enterprise customers. We have developed three variations of the product: a smaller version for homes, a medium-sized one for large indoor spaces like offices and hotels, and our flagship series, meant for large spaces such as manufacturing and industrial complexes. A single outdoor installation clears the air within a 10 km radius – depending on the topography and height of nearby buildings. In factories, large buildings or homes, a single Pure Skies unit improves air quality inside the entire building plus its surrounding.”

Devic Earth has raised a pre-Series A round of funding in 2021 of Rs 100 million from Blue Ashva Capital, an investment firm based out of Singapore and India that backs sustainable and profitable businesses which solve real challenges in core sectors such as agriculture, de-carbonization, circular economy and SMEs.

Shramik loans for migrants, Rozgar loans by VN Finance

In sync with the Prime Minister and RBI Governor’s clarion call to provide credit/ loans to the financially excluded and the unbanked, VN Finance, a tech-enabled NBFC, has announced small ticket loan offerings – ‘Shramik Loan’ and ‘Rozgar Loan’ for migrant workers and financially excluded small businessmen and women on the eve of Independence Day 2020. In the aftermath of Covid-19 and the problems faced by lakhs of people, VN Finance’s approach is to deploy 24X7 service and disburse loans within a day with the least number of documents and hassle-free interaction using technology.

The ticket size of the loan starts from Rs. 25,000 onwards. Those people, who need unsecured loans and have no security or no existing assets, can directly (or through intermediaries) approach VN Finance and share their creditworthiness and repayment capacity. They will get the funds at the best of terms to achieve their dreams.

VN Finance also offers Secured Loans such as Loan Against Property, Loans against Gold Jewellery and Loans against Inventories. Every business needs ongoing working capital and this requirement keeps increasing with the growth of the business. VN Finance’s professional team fully understands business needs and provides funding against the goods and inventories already lying in the shops/godown. The small business owner just needs to furnish the inventory list, its value and their needs.

Mohit Kakkad, Director & Founder, VN Finance, said, “We stand committed to our vision of changing the society by helping people to follow the dreams by easy and quick financing. We are focusing on the segments who cannot afford to wait and cannot meet or understand the complex and time-consuming processes of conventional lenders. We work tirelessly to develop delivery mechanisms with technology to make our disbursal process easy, efficient and widespread. We plan to expand aggressively in Mumbai MMR region, Maharashtra State and gradually across India.”

VN Finance is also developing a network of banking intermediaries, Self-Help Groups (SHGs), NGOs and correspondents who can help facilitate credit to migrant workers, unbanked and financially deprived businessmen and women. Since the target segment is not necessarily highly literate and educated in technology, VN Finance is using technology to help them and the financial intermediaries in the easiest of ways.

Mohit Kakkad firmly believes that if India has to achieve financial inclusion in the true sense, NBFCs such as VN Finance have to play a significant role in enhancing financial literacy, seeking minimal collateral, shorter processing time and building distribution network while grappling with lack of credit history, absence of formal identity, cyclical income and paperwork.

The Union Government and regulators have taken various initiatives such as Basic savings bank deposit account (BSBDA), Lead banking scheme (LBS), Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) and set up payments’ infrastructure like BHIM, UPI, DBT to jumpstart the process of financial inclusion. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in its National Strategy for Financial Inclusion 2019-24, announced that public credit registry has to be made fully operational by March 2022 so that authorised financial entities can leverage the same for assessing credit proposals.NBFCs can also access and analyze data from Google Pay, Walmart-owned PhonePe and Whatsapp Pay (to launch soon).