SXSW Startups: AirPop Makes Healthy Air
The Forrest Four-Cast: March 4, 2018
At the 2018 SXSW Accelerator Pitch Event on March 10 and 11, 50 startups from around the world will attempt to impress a panel of judges with their skills, creativity and innovation. Winners in each of 10 categories will be honored at the Accelerator Award Ceremony at 7 pm Sunday, March 11, at the Hilton Austin, Salon AB. Network with all the finalists from 11 am to 1:30 pm on Monday, March 12, at SXSW Accelerator Demo Day, at the Hilton Austin, Salon C. The SXSW Accelerator Pitch Event (as well as the Demo Day) takes place within the Startup & Tech Sectors track of programming.
A finalist in the Health and Wearables Technology category, AirPop is pioneering the innovation of air wearables for personal and public health. Co-located in Shanghai and San Francisco, the AirPop product brand is a line of sensing, high-efficiency air pollution accessories for 4 billion+ people breathing pervasive ambient air pollution. AirPop’s co-founder Chris Hosmer (pictured above) answered our questions for this interview. See the AirPop pitch live at 5 pm Sunday, March 11, at the Hilton Austin, Salon AB.
What is the AirPop competitive advantage?
Some wearables for health and fitness have not seemed to fully deliver on their promise, or our expectations, of making us healthier or happier. While AirPop is a type of wearable, we’re fundamentally different because we mediate a person’s internal health and their environmental health. Rather than capturing a person’s activity, we correlate respiratory health and local air quality depending on exposure and activity. Even without a smartphone, our wearable is a vital preventive health accessory that many young people wear as a lifestyle choice. Once it becomes connected, the mask becomes tremendously more powerful for the emerging health-concerned consumers because it creates the mind shift necessary for individuals to understand the consequence of air quality to their long-term health as well as helps them build behaviors that limit their overall risk. We protect when you inhale and detect when you exhale.
What does AirPop hope to achieve in 2018?
We’ll triple our user base in 2018, which is currently around 1.5 million daily active users, expand into India as a second home market and launch the second generation of our Halo Sensor that has significantly more sophisticated sensing capabilities. We’ve quickly established ourselves as the number one consumer mask for health-conscious millennials (post ’90s) in China, and we see a similar conversion potential in urban India, especially considering more and more Chinese and Indian millennials are leapfrogging existing legacy healthcare products and services and exploring how to build lifestyles of wellness and health through self-serve solutions.
What inspired your team to apply for SXSW Accelerator?
We’re at a strategic point where our core business is experiencing solid growth and we’re ready to invest in significantly more advanced breathomics sensing and analytics into our roadmap, so we can begin to focus on the specific disease verticals that our data, reach and technology can have the greatest impact for.
Has anyone on your team been to SXSW before?
I attended in 2007.
What is your most outstanding memory?
Bruce Sterling’s closing keynote/rant where he talked about the internet in 2007 as “folk” technology.
Who is your team looking to network with at SXSW 2018?
AirPop hopes to connect with other entrepreneurs and partners in digital health who are exploring the potential of lo-fidelity/hi-value sensing in next generation wearables and smart city applications. We’re also keen to network with investors and engineers in environmental and health technology.
Has AirPop been involved with other tech conferences before?
AirPop attended Startup Grind, Rock Health Summit and Startup Health Conference in 2017, all in the Bay Area. In the area of healthcare it’s still very early. Lots of startups are digitizing services and optimizing for the healthcare system that exists here in the U.S. Although there is a ton of capital flowing into digital health, it will be some time before real step change innovation happens in some of the core issues. In the meantime, startups are chipping away at an antiquated, bloated and inefficient system and we are excited to be part of that effort.
AirPop currently splits time between San Francisco and Shanghai. How does that split in cities work? Also, what is the startup scene like in Shanghai?
We built our company culture around the idea of “Blended Innovation.” We marry the mobile-first pragmatism and ingenuity of China’s tech scene with the core creative and technical innovation Silicon Valley is known for, particularly in digital devices and healthcare innovation. One of our headquarters is in San Francisco and the other is in Shanghai, each headed by one of our two founders. This deliberate cross-border setup allows us to directly leverage China’s supply base, manufacturing capabilities and Shenzhen hardware ecosystem, so we are already experts at developing, manufacturing and scaling. Our team being fluent in both cultures is definitely a unique advantage for a young, fast-moving company.
For what you do on a day-to-day basis at AirPop, what does work-life balance look like?
I no longer fly to back and forth to China every three weeks so that feels like a huge positive change. Essentially, living in California and staying up to date with our China team 15 hours ahead means I’m always sort of in two time zones.
How long has the AirPop team been together?
AirPop has been operating for three years but our core team has been working together for about six.
If your team wasn’t involved in building AirPop, what would they be doing?
We all feel strongly that not enough is being done to curb some of our environmental, and therefore public health, issues at the point of origin — the creation of new products. A lot of production processes, materials and packaging are designed and specified without the creators knowing very much about the toxicity, health hazards and ecological impacts. Having spent a lot of time deep in the manufacturing sector, I feel an overwhelming sense of responsibility to exercise caution at every step of the productization process and evaluate the total human, environmental and commercial costs associated with bringing a new product into the world. But there are scant resources and even fewer recognized authorities that can provide oversight and enforcement for even some of the already regulated chemicals and materials being used, let alone new ones that are unregulated. I often fantasize about creating a global Humane Design agency that can educate, mentor and advise brands about their ecotoxicology footprint AND regulate and enforce the responsible use of chemicals, processes and materials in product development.
Looking at the entire tech industry, what trend do you think is most underrated?
Call me old-fashioned, but I think solar generally is still one of the most underrated paradigmatic enablers around. Capture, conversion and storage economics are getting to the point where real multiplier effects can be realized.
Other than AirPop, what is world’s the most exciting startup at present?
It’s one that I can’t talk about, they are in stealth for at least another three years but it involves the most insane team of talent I’ve ever heard of.
What has the startup experience taught you about life?
The most vital part of any enterprise is the human factor. The most potentially devastating threat to any enterprise is the human factor. People are everything. The right people doing work they love and excel at is everything.
Look for interviews with other SXSW Accelerator finalists in this space between now and March. Startups already profiled as part of this series include 70MillionJobs, AfterNow, ARwall, Bluefield, Cambridge Cancer Genomics, Commutifi, DashTag, FanFood, FutureFuel.io, Goalsetter, HealthTensor, Instreamatic, Leaf, Moms Can: Code, Pawame, PolyPort, Sceenic, Switchboard, UPGRADED, USHR and Vochlea.
Or, click here to browse the full lineup of startups for SXSW Accelerator 2018.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
