Clean drinking water is getting scarce. Current water infrastructure is inadequate in the face of increasing droughts, unreliable supplies and climate change. Put simply, there is an urgent need for resilient solutions. In this regard, a Bengaluru-based deep-tech startup, Uravu Labs, has a solution; it is literally creating water out of air, thanks to its unique 100% renewable water technology.
Focused on building a renewable water infrastructure, this climate tech startup recently announced its seed round of funding. The lead investor in the round was Anicut Capital and it was co-led by Rocketship.vc and Speciale Invest. The company also received participation from investors like Vesta (France), Venture Catalysts (India), Verso Holdings (Luxembourg), Spectrum Impact (India), Echo River Capital (US) and other angel investors from India, the US and the Middle East. The company plans to utilise the capital to scale its 100% renewable water technology.
Today, many sectors are in the midst of a renewable revolution – like solar PV and wind help us go renewable in the electricity sector. Water sector is surprisingly left out. Uravu is bridging this gap by bringing a revolution with 100% renewable water. But what is 100% renewable water?
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Company officials explain their unique technology harnesses inexhaustible atmospheric moisture and uses only renewable energy to produce high-quality drinking water. Air contains water equivalent to six times of all the world’s rivers combined and it replenishes naturally every 8-10 days. Also, the water renewable technology uses clean and unlimited energy of the Sun, and carbon neutral sources of waste heat and biomass are utilised. Plus, not a drop of water is wasted in the process, unlike technologies like Reverse Osmosis which waste more water than they purify. In short, the company’s industrial-scale and affordable solution has the ability to transform various markets—primarily the beverage industry, real estate and hospitality sectors, and will be commercialised by 2023.
Founded in 2019 by Pardeep Garg, Swapnil Shrivastav, Venkatesh R, and Govinda Balaji, Uravu Labs has signed beverage giants such as AB InBev and Radico Khaitan as customers and is reaching out to many more beverage and commercial customers in the Indian, Southeast Asian, Middle East, and Japanese markets. The fresh funding will build the path for further expansion in these geographies.
The seed investment will enable Uravu to accelerate its ongoing work of minimising the stress on groundwater. The company co-founder and CEO 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.”
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Shrivastav added, “100% renewable water is the missing puzzle in the transformation towards a more sustainable world and Uravu is aiming to truly deliver real world environmental and social impact with its scalable solution in the mid-to-long term.”
This new-age climate-tech startup has previously raised an undisclosed amount during a pre-seed funding round led by Speciale Invest in 2021.
Other investors included angel investors like Peter Yolles (Echo River Capital), Soren Schroder, Shigeru Sumimoto (Conselux Corporation), and Tomoki Kaneko (Kaneko Cord).
