What we talked about
Harshil Ahuja is not your typical college student. At just 16 years old, he founded Novarus Technologies, a startup with an ambitious mission: to solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges by ensuring universal access to clean air, clean water, renewable energy, and sustainable agriculture. Now at 19, while studying Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M, Harshil is scaling Novarus into a global force for health tech and sustainability.
Show notes
Today on the show, we’re joined by Harshil Ahuja, a 19-year-old college student and the founder of Novarus Technologies. Harshil started Novarus at just 16 years old with a bold vision: to create simple, innovative solutions that address some of the world’s most pressing challenges:like ensuring universal access to clean air and water.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00) Welcome back to the Prevetted Podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Today on the show we are joined by Harsil Aush Aush Aouha, a 19 year old college student and the founder of Novorus Technologies. Harsil started Novorus at 16 years old with a bold vision.
to create simple innovative solutions that address some of the world’s most pressing challenges like ensuring universal access to clean air and water. Under his leadership, Novus is building at the intersection of health tech and sustainability aiming to enhance human health and environmental resilience, ultimately extending and improving quality of life worldwide. ⁓ Beyond being a young entrepreneur,
Harshal is also seeking mentors and partners who share his mission to make a lasting global impact. So let’s dive into his journey, his vision for Numerous and what it takes to launch a purpose-driven company before even graduating college. ⁓ So welcome Harshal ⁓ to the job. How are you doing today?
Harshil Ahuja (01:14) Thank you so much Federico, it’s a pleasure to be here. I’m doing well, how about yourself?
Federico Ramallo (01:19) I am doing amazing So, very interesting that you started Nuvverous at just 16 I started my first startup at 16 as well, I still remember So, what was the spark that pushed you to act so young?
Harshil Ahuja (01:38) Yeah, actually. So it began even before that back in 2019. My mom was on a trip to visit our family in India because our entire extended family lives there. And while she was there, I just happened to FaceTime her one day. And when she was getting ready to go outside, she had to put on like a full N95 mask to go outside along with some other face protection just to be able to breathe. And, you know, I was like maybe 12, 13 years old at the time.
So I was very curious as to why she was doing that. And she told me it was because the air quality in India gets so bad that time of year that you can’t go outside without those things. And that really kind of confused me, you know, because when I get to go outside, I don’t need to wear anything like that. So why should anyone need to resort to those types of things? And I think that was kind of the initial spark is that underlying question of why do some people need to, you know, buy such expensive things just to
able to breathe clean air, know, something that we all need to survive. And I think kind of from there that was the inciting incident that led me down this path.
Federico Ramallo (02:50) Interesting, very interesting. ⁓ I live in Mexico doing business in the US a lot, so I travel there a lot ⁓ and I’ve seen that in the US they do care more about the environment than most other countries, Mexico, India as well, right? ⁓ And I’ve seen a lot of pollution around the city, on lakes and things like that.
Mexico City has an issue with air because the way that the city sits it sits around mountains and there’s no wind and then the smoke gets contained within the city, right? ⁓ and that becomes an issue, right? So I can see how the quality of air is something important. Yeah ⁓
Harshil Ahuja (03:35) Yeah.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Federico Ramallo (03:46) In California there was this forest that got burned recently, well, four or five years ago, that affected the air quality as well.
Harshil Ahuja (03:52) Mm-hmm.
Yeah, here in California we have multiple wildfires every single year. Actually right now, wildfire season is about to begin again, so it’s going to be pretty bad here for some time now, you know, all throughout the state.
Federico Ramallo (04:14) So what would you describe the mission of Novarus?
Harshil Ahuja (04:21) I think if I had to put it simply, mission of Novars is to provide access to life’s basic necessities for everyone by creating affordable and sustainable consumer products and infrastructure. That’s kind of the fundamental idea that we revolve around. We started with clean air and clean water, but since then we’ve branched off quite a bit into things like renewable energy, agriculture, those types
of things as well. So we’re a very all-encompassing company. We don’t just focus on one or two things.
Federico Ramallo (04:58) Right, interesting. ⁓ So you have mass filtration and water filtration, right?
Harshil Ahuja (05:09) Correct, those are our two consumer products, yes.
Federico Ramallo (05:13) Right. And what standards of filtration are you looking to fulfill with these products?
Harshil Ahuja (05:21) So both of them are certified for the highest standards of filtration. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with kind of the rating system for say a mask, but if you’ve heard of like an N95 or that kind of system. what that basically means is that that mask is rated to remove 95 % of particulates that are 2.5 microns in size. Our masks are certified as N99, which means they remove 99 % of particulates 2.5 microns.
in size and just for reference a human hair is about 60 microns wide so 2.5 microns is something that you can’t even see with your naked eye and it very easily enters your respiratory system. For the water filters the same thing we’re 99.99 % against particulates that are 0.3 microns in size so we have set a very high standard for ourselves in terms of what our products should be able to do.
Federico Ramallo (06:18) wow amazing so with 99.9 % of ⁓ you said 3 micron in water right? ⁓ 0.3 microns so you’re also filtering bacteria and viruses right?
Harshil Ahuja (06:30) Yeah, 0.3 microns in water. Yeah.
Correct.
Correct.
Federico Ramallo (06:39) very interesting, yeah. In my house I use a Berkeley filter for water filtration and it’s very good, very reliable. ⁓ Kind of clunky because it’s a big metal piece but it has no moving parts. yeah, and then we, because…
Harshil Ahuja (06:45) Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (07:05) In the US, the water that comes to your house is really good, right? It’s high quality. ⁓ here in Mexico, it’s not portable. So we filter the water anyways, right? ⁓ And one thing that I notice is that people ⁓ here buy ⁓ water in containers, in 20 liters containers. ⁓
Harshil Ahuja (07:09) Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (07:31) so they get a truck that delivers portable water to their houses so the CO2 for that is super high ⁓ so I switch for the filters and then we put a residential filter in the house as well so we have double filter
Harshil Ahuja (07:41) Right.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, here in the US honestly, like there are some places which still don’t have great water quality. You know, they have set very high standards for it, the EPA, but even then there’s quite a few places, like especially in the Midwest, that don’t have great water quality. They’re very heavily contaminated with heavy metals like lead, mercury, arsenic, fluoride, which are incredibly dangerous if you consistently drink them, which I mean, I guess everyone does because you need water to survive, right?
So, our products have been designed with the focus of more rural communities, but since then we’ve also started creating variations that have household applications as well. So we have larger products that are on the market right now, which we’ve used in industrial filtration applications or even for household use as well.
Federico Ramallo (08:45) Interesting.
So you’re trying to solve clean air, clean water. Are you planning to solve other problems other than those two?
Harshil Ahuja (08:58) Yes, absolutely. That’s by far one of the biggest things that we want to do. So we’ve kind of segmented it into four main categories as of now. Air, water, electricity, and agriculture. Those are the four main areas that we want to focus on, at least for now. ⁓ We’ve already addressed clean air and water. In terms of electricity, we’re doing a lot of projects regarding renewable energy. ⁓
primarily for more rural communities by collaborating with local governments. So one thing that we’ve seen a lot of is that in different parts of the world, whether it’s parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, is a lot of the communities there either have no power or they rely on some type of centralized power grid.
Now with this centralized power grid, do have quite a few issues that come up. The biggest one being people do try to damage those power grids in order to siphon additional power for their communities, which means that you need to hire third party security and maintenance becomes a lot bigger of an issue to make sure nobody from any community is tampering with anything. So what we’ve done is we’ve gone in and we’ve kind of focused on a more modular per community basis system in which each village or
community gets a customized solution based on their needs. So we have four main things that we focus on for that. have solar, wind, water, and we also have another form of electricity called piezoelectricity. The concept behind piezoelectricity is that every time you take a step you release kinetic energy and if there’s a way you can harness that kinetic energy you can then convert that into electrical which you can then use as power. Now this can work great in a mass populous
area like a market, a hospital, a school where a lot of people are moving consistently throughout the day because then what you can do is you can create customized flooring that these people walk on and you can harness all of that kinetic energy that would have been lost otherwise. So using these four systems we’re now working in a couple of different places to actually create these new systems. We’re working a lot in Africa on this to start but also some projects in the Philippines in that side as well. So we’re very kind
of focused on, you know, accessibility to all these different things because we know that if you can solve a fundamental problem like clean water, it actually can turn into something much bigger for people. So to give you an example of that, a lot of what we’ve seen is that when families have to focus a lot on, you know,
getting food on the table or needing to walk multiple miles a day to get clean water. That takes away from a lot of what they could be doing, right? Kids could be going to school during that time. Parents could be working, doing other different things at that time. But because you’re focused entirely on survival, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for personal growth that way. So by basically working with governments and different organizations to help address some of those grassroots issues, we can then allow people to focus on what
truly matters. know, kids can go get proper education, things like that, and that ultimately helps uplift the community as a whole because now they’re not focused on, I have clean water today? They’re focused on, I’m going to go to school today and learn something new for my future.
Federico Ramallo (12:22) Right, I heard ⁓
about the story about ⁓ small towns, I think it was in Philippines where they had to carry water around with buckets and basically they would have to spend an hour a day, maybe more just on getting water ⁓ because ⁓ the distribution was not even there ⁓
Harshil Ahuja (12:33) Mm-hmm. Yeah.
and.
Right.
Federico Ramallo (12:50) ⁓ and that water was not filtered anyways right so I can see how you know and that affects basically the quality of life not only on the water that they drink but also the time that they have to spend on gathering the water right
Harshil Ahuja (13:08) Exactly. And drinking that dirty water, all it does is make you sick, right? And when you’re sick, what can you really do? Anyway, it’s ⁓ like just domino effect of one problem, dirty water leads to all these different things happening.
Federico Ramallo (13:26) right, yeah I can see that effect happening I mean I… where I live, 3 hours away from where I live I live in Guadalajara in the city but if you go outside the city there are small towns that basically they are doomed because ⁓ they are far away enough ⁓ that if a kid grow up there
They don’t have any education opportunity, other than elementary school. And the population is so small enough and so close to the city that they are in limbo, right? Because they are far away, so it takes two and a half hours, maybe three to get from that town to a school in the city.
if you are taking the public transport ⁓ so they’re basically isolated and they are in this limbo where they are close enough in the city that they are not considered rural but far enough that in practice they are ⁓ and it’s very hard for them to find growth opportunity within the town
Harshil Ahuja (14:42) Yeah.
Absolutely, yeah.
Federico Ramallo (14:53) Yeah. So can you tell us a story about where numbers change ⁓ someone’s life or some community’s life?
Harshil Ahuja (15:06) Yeah.
⁓ Definitely that’s probably one of my favorite things to talk about. ⁓ So to kind of preface it, just to give a little bit of context, the social aspect of what we do is very important to me. know, I have, we have implemented kind of a buy one, give one program where every time somebody purchases a product from us, we actually set one aside to donate or give out to somebody who’s in need. So with that, we’ve been able to give out tens of thousands of filters to
Federico Ramallo (15:11) the
Harshil Ahuja (15:37) people all over the world and it’s been an incredibly successful initiative that we’ve been able to do. ⁓ But if I had to give one example of a story, I think honestly a lot of my stories are going to revolve around the Philippines just because you know we’ve done a lot of work there in the past couple of years. We’ve probably worked in five or six communities just within the Philippines alone and it’s one of my favorite countries in the world just to be in.
Last year, 2024, we had partnered with an organization in the Philippines. And when we had gone there, we had very little idea of exactly what to expect. We hadn’t really seen the communities before. We were only informed about the number of people in the community, but also.
kind of what their water situation was like. So we knew they had access to groundwater and there was a private property next to one of the communities that had access to a spring and that property was gracious enough to actually be giving access to that spring to the people of the community. Now when we went there we first did a complete assessment of the area just to see kind of what the situation was like and when I tell you I’ve never seen something that
bad in my life. I’m being entirely honest with you. Like it was covered in sewage and when we went it was monsoon season there so it was raining constantly and all the runoff from the village was just accumulating at the center because it was located on a hillside and it was just reeking of sewage and trash and there were animal feces everywhere, human feces everywhere and we walked around for a little bit to
Federico Ramallo (17:02) Wow.
Harshil Ahuja (17:27) kind of understand what the situation was like. We talked to a few people there and we quickly realized like, yeah, okay, the water is a serious problem here because they’re using the same water for cooking, cleaning, drinking, washing themselves, washing everything. So there was a lot of contamination, especially due to all the feces that were around.
of E. coli and different viral infections going on within the community. So we came back and we were trying to think of exactly what to do because a couple of other organizations had gone through the community and tried to give them some type of know systems but they hadn’t really worked that well.
So we came in with the idea of, they have a couple of water collection points already where they’re able to get the water from. What if we simply retrofit our water filters onto these collection points so that, you know…
they can get the clean water directly and we can eliminate the extra step of first needing to have clean containers, then putting, you know, taking the water in the clean container, then filtering it in their home, then keeping that. So the idea was just to go straight to the source. And if we can filter all the water coming out of there, hopefully after a long enough time, we can make the water in the area more drinkable. And we only had a couple of days to put this project together just because of how tight our timeframe was. But
We were able to install quite a few filters in multiple communities there. you know, when you’re able to see like a couple of just a few children just, you know, using what you spent years of your life working on and how happy they were to just have clean drinkable water, it was honestly like one of the most gratifying feelings I’ve ever had. ⁓ We still have that project going on today and
It’s been probably one of my favorite things to do because that was one of the first times that I actually went in person to a site that we were working on and actually did the implementation myself. Usually we’ll just work with an organization but we’ll be here remotely but that was the first time that I actually went and got a hands-on experience with it. So yeah, I think that’s just one of our stories. know, we have a lot of different things going on, not just in the Philippines but in India. We’re starting a project in Haiti.
and Guatemala, lots of different places in Africa. So it’s something that I’m very passionate about and honestly it’s one of the reasons that keeps me going at the end of the day.
Federico Ramallo (20:08) Very nice, yes. Yeah, I think that that’s… We get used to all our amenities we have in our houses, right? And eventually we don’t think about all the things that we have, right? Or how bad other people, other communities are, right? So I think that, you know…
Harshil Ahuja (20:18) and.
Absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (20:38) being able to help on providing clean water to these communities is a life changer for them, right?
Harshil Ahuja (20:45) Yeah, definitely, definitely. And you know, sometimes when people, they go to these different places and they see what a lot of these people have to live through, the first kind of notion that people have is, you know, feeling sorry for them, like,
They’re kind of being dehumanized in a way because you know when you feel sorry for somebody who’s in that state and you’re like That’s really sad and all these other different sort of negative feelings then get associated with it It really is not beneficial to anyone Honestly, and that’s why whenever I go to these different places It’s like you always have to go with an open heart and mind. You know you can never just think that because these guys don’t have What I have there’s
somehow
lesser than I am or anything like that. There’s still people at the end of the day who are trying to live just like you are. I think having an open mind and being receptive to all different types of people from different backgrounds is really what’s going to keep us going forward as a society. Just trying to separate people based on what they have and don’t have has never worked in the past and won’t work in the future either.
Federico Ramallo (22:02) that’s amazing, yeah and I can see how we could dehumanize communities like that because ⁓ you start feeling sorry for them and yeah, that’s not a good path to follow because there’s still people, they’re still smart, working they just have a difficult situation going through
Harshil Ahuja (22:19) Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (22:30) and sometimes lack of information, right? They don’t know how important it is for them, right?
Harshil Ahuja (22:37) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (22:40) ⁓ very interesting
Harshil Ahuja (22:41) We’re doing what we
can, you know. So we’re trying to make one life better and that’s all that matters.
Federico Ramallo (22:50) Right. I like this idea of, you know, like I was talking in another episode about nonprofits versus for-profit organizations, right? So a nonprofit basically needs to do activities to get funding, right? ⁓ To get donations. And the effort to get those donations basically undermines the mission, right? ⁓ Whereas if you…
Harshil Ahuja (23:17) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (23:19) build a for-profit business with a mission, then you have much more independence because you have your own resources to follow the mission. ⁓ So I think that’s a much better and sustainable strategy than just relying on donations.
Harshil Ahuja (23:35) Hmm.
You know, it’s interesting because we, since we work with a lot of organizations, we’ve kind of seen like both ends of the spectrum. know, like I’ve seen people who are incredibly passionate about the work that they do in their organization and they give up like, you know, 90 % of their paycheck just to fund their organization. And I don’t want it, I don’t want the notion to be like nonprofits kind of have to do certain things that sort of stray from their mission because at the end of the day, if it’s really a
Nonprofit that cares about what it’s doing, you know They’re gonna do what they need to in order to fulfill that goal, right? Even we as for-profit companies have to do certain things in order to survive right like I sell products I have to raise money from VCs. I may have to go take out a loan from somebody, right? So at the end of the day, we all need to do certain things in order to help keep us going but no, I definitely understand what you’re saying and I think that ⁓
You know, there’s always going to be people who choose one way over another, which may not be right. You know, I’ve seen people who end up like pocketing half the money they fundraise instead of putting it towards what they’re actually supposed to be doing. I’ve seen CEOs do the exact same thing. So I think it’s a little bit unfair to kind of say that nonprofits are, you know, wrong in that sense or like for-profit companies have it easier that way. But
each kind of to do their own thing to survive, you know.
Federico Ramallo (25:24) Yeah, I mean on bigger nonprofits what I’ve seen happens and this is probably not all of them but I’ve seen most of them, like UNICEF, less than 14 % of the money donated actually goes to the mission and the rest goes to management so that pattern happens with bigger ⁓ nonprofits
Harshil Ahuja (25:42) Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, definitely.
Definitely.
Federico Ramallo (25:55) ⁓
So that happens. But with smaller nonprofits, I’ve seen that they’re much more efficient and they’re much more passionate about the mission. So they’re willing to ⁓ put more resources towards the mission. ⁓ And yeah, the discussion we’re having was more about ⁓ the ⁓ effort that it takes to ⁓
Harshil Ahuja (26:05) and
Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (26:24) to raise capital by donations, right? That means that you don’t need to make ⁓ raise even funds and all those type of things or depend on a few ⁓ philanthropy organizations that are willing to give money, right? ⁓ The discussion was that that effort generates a dependency, right?
Harshil Ahuja (26:39) Sure.
Federico Ramallo (26:48) whereas if ⁓ what you’re doing on building a for-profit organization where you’re products then you have less dependency of a few investors and you have ⁓ of course you have to do activities to run the business, right? To keep the business alive but on both ⁓ but it is a much more sustainable ⁓ the point was that
Harshil Ahuja (26:48) right.
Federico Ramallo (27:19) the for-profit actually helps the mission more because it’s more sustainable and has less dependency of a few ⁓ donators, right? That was ⁓ the experience that was shared to me, right? And it’s more sustainable throughout the time because once you build ⁓ the e-commerce and you sell the products and you promote it, then…
The better you do that the more resources you have to fulfill the mission, right?
Harshil Ahuja (27:52) Sure. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (27:54) So anyway,
that was the idea.
Harshil Ahuja (27:57) Sure, yeah, no, that makes sense.
Federico Ramallo (28:00) Yeah, but yeah, I agree that there are ⁓ nonprofits that are doing great job and they’re spending most of the resources to fulfill the mission, right?
Harshil Ahuja (28:13) Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we’ve worked with a lot of those and you know that’s kind of who we try to work with is not somebody who’s just going after the fame or you know that LinkedIn clout, you know, just wanting to say that yeah we’re doing this, this and this, but somebody who really cares at the end of the day.
Federico Ramallo (28:33) Right.
What has been the hardest challenge so far? ⁓ Was funding the technology, balancing school and startup life.
Harshil Ahuja (28:46) ⁓ that’s a great question. think, you know, running a company is just never easy in general. It’s always full of challenges of different scales and magnitudes, but…
I’ve always been like a product person and like an engineer since I was very young. Like growing up, I used to love playing with Legos and tinkering with different things in the house and breaking different appliances and God knows what. And that kind of sort of helped me in the initial creation process of actually making the products themselves. But what I learned very quickly is that you can have a great product, but if you can’t get it in front of the right people and it doesn’t really matter now, does it?
So having to learn that marketing and sales side of it was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. Because frankly, I don’t like doing it a whole lot. I really don’t. But I’ve learned that you do need to do certain things that you don’t like and get out of your comfort zone if you really want to make it far. So that was honestly one of the hardest things. then honestly, with any kind of hardware company, having to go through a design, an R &D, and then a manufacturing process,
process
and supply chain process is probably one the most difficult things you can take on. Like some days I wish like why don’t I just start an AI company and run everything from my laptop right? I wouldn’t need to care about like how much inventory I have in my warehouse or anything like that. But honestly just it’s
It’s been hard, but I’ve had a really good time doing it, so, and I’ve learned so much doing it that honestly I don’t think I could see myself doing anything else right now, so I think it was pretty worth it in the end.
Federico Ramallo (30:37) I agree, it’s hard to be an entrepreneur and it is harder to run a physical store, ⁓ physical product ⁓ plus the manufacturing of the product, that’s you I can see that ⁓ Have you read the book ⁓ Zappos? Delivering Happiness? ⁓
now they are big, at one point, in the book they talk about that they had a container full of shoes, they sell shoes and they had a container full of shoes ⁓ and then the truck has an accident on the road and then there are shoes spread all over the highway and ⁓ that was a make or break moment
for the company because they were so small that if they lost that container full of shoes, of products, they would basically bankrupt the company, right? ⁓ So they went, did a rescue mission to rescue the product and, you know, get it ready to to sell and, you know, recovery as much as possible and they were able to basically save the company.
through that, right? I’m probably paraphrasing from what I remember, but that was kind of the story, right? Yeah.
Harshil Ahuja (32:04) Wow.
Yeah, I mean, you gotta do certain things sometimes. Thankfully I haven’t had to do anything like that just yet, but yeah, I completely understand that kind of idea of really needing to save whatever you can.
Federico Ramallo (32:26) I ⁓ think that one of the first stages of the company is survival, right? and then after that is how can I scale the company so it doesn’t depend on me because if everything depends on you or most of it depends on you then ⁓ you have a job rather than a company ⁓
This is a lesson from the E-Myth, the entrepreneurial myth, another book. ⁓ And I’m kind of paraphrasing, but that’s the idea. And then how much can the company grow? Well, how much can your arms extend? And the day you’re sick for whatever reason, then everything stops. ⁓
at that point is when you start building processes to automate a lot of things, right? And ⁓ then the challenge there is that when you do that, the company becomes much less efficient, right? So can, you know, could the company survive that inefficiency, right? ⁓ So, so yeah, and, and anyway, that that has been my journey, you know, of stages that I’ve been, you know, going through.
Harshil Ahuja (33:33) Thank
Federico Ramallo (33:47) ⁓ Where do you think you are on that journey? ⁓
Harshil Ahuja (33:53) Good question. I think we’ve kind of started to enter the phase of, you know, needing to build some of those automated systems. Like we have a great team of people that can do all different types of things, whether it’s marketing, sales, operations, product design. So I’ve kind of worked hard to build up this ecosystem where people can know how to do things without me, but
To a certain extent, I still need to be there to make sure that everything still goes smoothly. ⁓ And being in college, being an engineering student, it kind of takes a lot of time away from that as well. So I think I’m probably at the point where I need to start figuring out what’s the best way to keep things working without me being there 24-7, 365.
Federico Ramallo (34:45) right, very interesting, yeah I recommend you read the book, the E-Myth because it will give you this idea you have? nice, very nice I think you’re the first person that I mentioned the book and have read it, so congratulations yeah yeah yeah
Harshil Ahuja (34:55) Yes. Yeah.
Really? I think
I read that actually last year ⁓ when we were really kicking into high gear with some of these different things and I was really into reading a lot of different books at the time. ⁓ And yeah, that one and then…
think it was called… It’s like Make It Stick or Made To Stick, something by Chip and Dan Heath about really getting an idea to stick in your customer’s head. That was one of my favorite books that I’ve read. You should definitely check it out if you haven’t. think I’m forgetting the title a little bit, but Something To Stick, that much I remember.
Federico Ramallo (35:48) let me write it down, something to stick I’ll look it up yeah I mean, there’s a point where I’ve been reading different books that then I don’t remember the title or the author but I remember the ideas or I do something and then eventually I learn ⁓ what I am doing it’s called whatever whatever and now I’m able to put a label to something that I’ve been doing
Harshil Ahuja (35:51) Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (36:18) you know, that
I learned, self-learned didn’t know how it was called, right?
Harshil Ahuja (36:21) Yeah, No,
100%. 100%.
Federico Ramallo (36:27) Yeah. So I understand that you won recognition at the Enterprise Leadership Conference,
Harshil Ahuja (36:29) Yeah.
yeah, was
almost two years ago now. No, over two years ago now. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (36:42) wow.
Can you tell us a little more about the experience?
Harshil Ahuja (36:49) Yeah, it was actually
man, have to kind of remember what it was like now because it was a long time ago. But I remember the opportunity came to me through my school that this Rotary Club where I live was kind of putting together this three day competition where, you know, different high school students from the Bay Area could compete with ⁓ and against each other. And it was kind of just a three day conference where you could learn a ton about entrepreneurship and actually put those two
practical use and at that point in time that’s when I had initially started Novars as a company like probably within that month or two when that was coming around and I just thought it would be great learning opportunity to just go and you know actually learn from people who have done this kind of thing before because it was just filled with mentors and people who had all had multiple successful businesses and companies and you know really made names for themselves so I went there
there
and was assigned with seven different people as part of a team. There were 12 teams in total and basically they said, okay, come up with a business idea. These are the different criteria’s you need to fulfill and you’re basically going to create like a pitch deck and present it to like a panel of five different investors at the end of the conference. So we spent three days, you know, putting together this idea of trash bins that could automatically sort the trash.
into recycle compost and landfill by scanning the contents of it because one thing that we saw was like when you go to an airport and you see those different bins you don’t know what the hell you’re supposed to put where like you’re just guessing after a certain point so we’re like okay if we can create something that does it for you and takes a lot of excess waste out of landfills and things like that it can be very beneficial so we took this idea and we created the whole business plan
business model around it about how we were going to first start by selling to like small apartment complexes and then hotels and then work our way up to like large-scale airports like train station things like that. So we’ve created this whole like B2B model and then eventually a B2G model where we can really scale this up by creating different versions of the product that have different things and different applications. Had the whole strategy laid out and then on the last day we presented it to the panel of judges and they liked our
enough and we won the competition so that was a really great experience ⁓ really really learned a lot there and I think I definitely applied a lot of the things that I learned at that conference today
Federico Ramallo (39:27) Ha
That’s amazing. Yeah, I was going to ask you like what lessons you learned from there that you applied today, right? ⁓
Harshil Ahuja (39:46) Yeah, I think
the biggest one was, you know, kind of like.
See, the thing that I’ve learned about business is you can spend all the time researching and learning about, you know, marketing or sales and reading books and articles about how all these different great people have done it. until you actually apply it yourself, it’s really just empty ideas in your head, right? You don’t actually know what to do with it. And I think the biggest thing that I took away from that is just how to utilize a network and actually learning how to network. Cause I, a 16 year old in high school doesn’t
know anything about networking honestly like they’ve heard the term before but you don’t really know how to apply it and use it long term but I think that was probably one of the biggest things I learned from it is just how do you go talk to people tell them about your idea and just you know have a positive exchange with them that’s not even transactional but you you and I are right now so that was probably one of my biggest takeaways from there other than obviously some like technical things of how do you
put together a pitch deck because I didn’t know how to do that either until then. So yeah, I think that was probably my biggest takeaway from that.
Federico Ramallo (41:06) Amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I think that the entrepreneur life has these stages, right? Kind of applies to life as well. But you you first you learn, then you earn, and then you return, right? And I think that, and it took me a while to understand that, right? Because I couldn’t understand what was the motivation for mentors to teach us.
Harshil Ahuja (41:22) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (41:34) as a young entrepreneur, like why? I ⁓ found great mentors throughout my career, but I couldn’t understand why until I understood this, that eventually you get to a point where you want to give back and share the lessons that you learned.
Harshil Ahuja (41:46) Okay.
Yeah.
Definitely, definitely. Yeah, I think having mentors has been so unbelievably helpful. So I’m the first entrepreneur in my family, like nobody’s done this other than me and having to figure out everything on your own is incredibly terrifying. So I was very grateful to have a lot of people who were there to support and guide me along the way.
Federico Ramallo (42:10) nice.
Right, right. And you’re at the mecca of entrepreneurship. you know, you have access to so many resources there that, yeah.
Harshil Ahuja (42:29) Yeah, yeah,
definitely.
Federico Ramallo (42:33) So tell me how do you see Novus evolving, you know in in the next ⁓ five years or so where your plans?
Harshil Ahuja (42:44) Yeah, that’s a great question. to kind of answer that, I’ll take you back about six months to where we kind of really started looking into infrastructure as another possibility of places that we can explore. similar to that renewable energy system that I was telling you about, another different place we’ve explored is desalination technology, which is frankly a very, very valuable technology, but has not been developed enough yet. So to give you some
idea of that desalination is the process of turning seawater into fresh water by removing the salt content from it but the current systems to do that are incredibly expensive like billions of dollars in order to keep first make them and keep them running long term now
I some people say like I’m an idealist like I want all these different things to happen that may or may not happen but frankly I don’t care what they say I’m still gonna think them. My ultimate goal is to hopefully get the world to a place where people don’t need to rely on things like air purifiers and water filters because we’ve already created infrastructure and different things that allow everyone to have access to them just full stop. So in order to do
that kind of what we’ve been doing is we’ve been taking ⁓ an initiative in this infrastructure by working on desalination, renewable energy, we’re working on making roads out of recycled plastic, and all these different things come into mind by saying, okay, if we can eventually get the world to a place where we can work to create this different infrastructure, so nobody needs air purifiers and water filters, I think then we have achieved our ultimate goal, right?
For Novars within the next 5 to 10 years, I’m really hoping that we can make a shift from consumer products into a big infrastructure focus and work on large scale technologies that will have an impact on a lot more people. Because a water filter is great for like a family of four people, but if I want to help 400, 4,000, 400,000 people, I don’t think one water filter can really do that. That’s where you need bigger, more sustainable projects to do that.
my goal is to ultimately switch like that but it’ll take a long time to do it you know these projects take years to just get into motion but I got a long life ahead of me hopefully fingers crossed and my goal is to really really make something valuable out of it
Federico Ramallo (45:16) Ha ha ha ha.
That’s amazing, yeah. I’ve seen the ⁓ desalinization technology that the people from Israel has been developing ⁓ and they use that as a strategy for peace because they give ⁓ water to their, to most, to all of their neighbors ⁓ as part of building ⁓
Harshil Ahuja (45:47) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (45:53) building a piece in the region. ⁓ And mostly that particular strategy has been successful.
So they produce water from themselves and then for other countries ⁓ with their development of desalinization technology because there is no water around there anywhere, right?
Harshil Ahuja (46:04) Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, so the desalination tech that we’ve kind of designed stemmed from an MIT project back in 2022. They created a small scale chamber that relied entirely on the evaporating and cooling of water. So I’m not too sure. I’m not sure how familiar you are with kind of water’s properties, but when you evaporate water, it leaves any kind of solids behind, whether it’s particulates, salts, bacteria, those types of things. That’s why people always say boil your water before
you drink it is because you’re removing, you’re kind of separating those solid contaminants and you’re killing off the bacteria inside. So MIT’s project was to create this kind of chamber that would concentrate sunlight into it and heat up the system inside and would have these what are called evaporative pads which are really just fabrics that are good at absorbing water and they’ll dip them into a tank that is filled with salt water and due to water’s properties, water is actually able to travel
Federico Ramallo (46:57) Great.
Harshil Ahuja (47:19) upwards even against gravity when it’s in contact with fabric like that. Like if you ever dipped a paper towel in water you’ll see that water is actually able to travel up like that. So they created about 10 of these within this chamber and what happens is when you heat the chamber itself you evaporate the water and the salt gets left behind on the evaporative pads. Then behind each one of these evaporative pads you can put a special aluminum plate that serves
as
a condenser mechanism and because the temperature of that aluminum is lower than the boiling point of water, it actually causes the water to condense back down into its liquid form and then you can collect that water that has now been cooled and separated from the salt. So they achieved this on a very small scale, like literally the size of a tissue box and we figured out how to scale it up. So we took the same fundamental ideologies but
Basically redesigned it to be suitable for a large-scale system So their concept was like this thing that you had to like point at the Sun throughout the day But if you need to make a system that does 50 to 100 million gallons of water in the day You can’t really like rotate it around like that So we redesigned it to be vertically stacked and set it horizontally like they had it and we actually created like a dish Mechanism at the top that tracks the Sun throughout the day so that as the Sun goes
from like east to west, we can actually rotate that dish and allow sunlight to enter the chamber at all times. So we’ve kind of come up with this brand new system that also uses like brushes and rollers and incredibly advanced tech to, you know, clean off the brine and send it to a different location for treatment and really create this like significantly more affordable system. Like this system for the size that we want to do would cost about 50 million.
dollars compared to the 1 billion that a traditional de-sale cost I think that’s a pretty significant price difference you know and that’s if we can do that like with one system we can create a lot of these throughout you know the US in Mexico in South America Africa Asia and really bring a lot of clean water to a lot of different people and obviously like transportation and logistics are a different problem but fundamentally like that
would allow for a lot of people to get clean water that way.
Federico Ramallo (49:54) yeah, mean the issue with the desalinization is a problem of energy, right? how much energy you need to make it happen because that translates directly to cost, right? so yeah, what you’re talking about is using the ⁓ surface tension of the water ⁓ to separate the salt out of the water, right? so that’s…
Harshil Ahuja (50:02) and energy cost.
Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (50:23) That’s very interesting way to do it. And then the second challenge that I’ve seen happen with those technologies is ⁓ long-term sustainability because then ⁓ you get the filters get stuck, the ⁓ machine requires maintenance, right? So how can you build a machine that can have lower operating costs and can self wash without, you
throwing away too much water, those type of things that’s where the all of our things helps to reduce the cost ⁓ both on operation and energy required to desalinate the water and that’s what makes it ⁓ will make it sustainable for everybody
Harshil Ahuja (51:13) Definitely, definitely.
Federico Ramallo (51:14) yeah
that’s amazing yeah the ⁓ you were talking about that people criticize that you are dreaming I think that as an entrepreneur ⁓ it’s kind of in our job description right to dream right ⁓ it’s a balance right because we need to dream but also we need to to execute right ⁓
Harshil Ahuja (51:29) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (51:41) and we need to make sure that things are working correctly so have you heard about this the story right of the entrepreneur the manager and the let me look for the other one I have it here ⁓ the entrepreneur the manager and the technician have you heard that story?
Harshil Ahuja (51:58) think a long time ago, remind me what it is.
Federico Ramallo (52:03) Yeah, so the technician is ⁓ the person that is super picky about, you know, how to do things, right? ⁓ So is that artisan that will never finish a ⁓ piece of art, right? Because it’s never perfect. It can always be improved, right? So that’s a perfectionist, right? It’s always looking to deliver everything perfect, right?
then ⁓ but doesn’t know anything about timing and delivery or doesn’t care about delivery dates, right? Then you have the manager that it’s managing the technician to deliver on time, right? And making sure that the job that is managing the jobs that are being done, right? ⁓ But it’s complaining that why are we doing this? Why are we building this stuff? I don’t understand, and it’s complaining. And then the entrepreneur
Harshil Ahuja (52:40) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (53:02) is the dreamer that goes that that puts the first two into into that that particular situation right
Harshil Ahuja (53:11) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (53:13) So we need dreamers, yeah, for sure, We need to dreamers that see the potential, see what is not there yet, right? But, ⁓ you know, so that’s part of the entrepreneur side. I also think that and the manager is the one that is actually rooting those dream into, you know, execution, right? We’re going to execute, we’re going to do, we’re going to deliver, right? ⁓ But we also need
Harshil Ahuja (53:29) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (53:42) the perfectionist, right? Because we want to do something great, but also has to be balanced on the be delivered on time within the constraints that we have, right? Time, resources, money, whatever it is, right? So anyway, that’s the three personalities that kind of ⁓ clash within each of us, So, so yeah, I encourage you to keep dreaming. Yeah.
Harshil Ahuja (54:09) I definitely will. I will.
Federico Ramallo (54:11) ⁓ So what advice would you give ⁓ young entrepreneurs that ⁓ are looking to ⁓ solve global sustainability challenges?
Harshil Ahuja (54:30) That’s a good question. ⁓
Federico Ramallo (54:31) the
Harshil Ahuja (54:38) I think the first thing is just learn as much as you can about the problem, you know, with and that goes for any type of entrepreneur that you want to be not even just a sustainable one is make sure you are an expert about the problem because that is half the journey, right? If you understand the problem incredibly well, the solution is the easy part. But if you don’t understand the problem, then like what are you making a solution for? So I think whether it’s sustainability,
or any type of environmental technology or even just activism for policies. You should really understand what you’re supporting and why you’re supporting it in the first place. And then kind of just go for it, honestly.
I don’t spend a whole lot of time overthinking things and thinking, should I do this, should I do that? I just say screw it man, I’m just gonna do it and see what happens and figure it out from there. The more you think about it, the more you’re gonna doubt yourself and then nothing’s gonna get done that way. ⁓
I think yeah, those two are probably the biggest things. Learn as much as you can about the problem because nowadays with, especially here in the US, you hear all these different conflicting opinions about what should be done, what’s the best way to handle it, all these different people and policies are trying to do different things.
I try to keep myself separate from those things and just look at things as objectively as possible, whether it’s new environmental policies or different research papers and studies have come out, really try to understand them, like, as they’re being told, not through any particular point of view. So I think objectivity is honestly going to be your best friend, like, long term. If you take things to heart or are very sort of like…
you think everyone has it out for you, you’re not going to make it very far. You have to understand that everyone at the end of the day wants to get themselves ahead and you are not anyone’s priority except yourself. So just keep going and don’t worry about what everyone else says to you.
Federico Ramallo (56:52) Right, right. Amazing. So ⁓ first I want to congratulate you on doing such a great job of ⁓ launching a company at a young age, becoming a successful entrepreneur at such a young age. You have…
All, you as you mentioned it, right, you have so much future ahead, so many things you can do, so much potential, right? ⁓ So I think you’re in a great path, right? And I do wish you, you know, the most success with this ⁓ endeavor, right? And, you know, I hope this doesn’t happen, but… ⁓
if at one point you find that you need to pivot or you need to start a new mission in your enterprise I know that all this experience that you’re collecting will help you do better in the future as well In either of those scenarios I do wish you the best success
Harshil Ahuja (58:03) Thank
Thank you. I really appreciate it.
Federico Ramallo (58:15) I started my first company at 16 as well and lasted for a few months before we tried to sell it and then the dotcom burst and the sale kind of
we were not able to go through with the sale but I got a lot of experience, right? But at that time I was thinking, oh man, we’re losing this, we’re losing that, so much effort we put into building this company, right? anyway, that happened to me and it was a process, yeah.
On top of that, I think it’s very valuable that you’re doing a mission-driven, ⁓ mission-first enterprise. I think that’s very valuable and something that is ⁓ lovable to share and encourage other people to do as well.
Harshil Ahuja (59:26) Thank you.
Federico Ramallo (59:29) Thank you, Harshal.
Harshil Ahuja (59:31) Thank you so much for having