Meet Preethi Jayakumar, who is leading clean tech solutions at Anzen Smart Walls with co-founder Dhruv Shah. Anzen is revolutionising indoor climate control, for healthier, energy efficient, and equitable homes for all.
Path to scale-up with the Better Futures Retrofit Accelerator
During the Challenge Identification Workshop with the first cohort of the Better Futures Retrofit Accelerator, we caught up with Preethi to understand her solution, her challenges and her dreams to scale up.
So how does Anzen contribute to the retrofit market? This is what Preethi had to say, “My startup contributes to the Better Futures Retrofit Accelerator by rethinking how we heat and ventilate the spaces. Often solutions are separate when it comes to indoor climate and environment control. We merge these two and simply increase the rate of retrofit for decarbonising indoor environments.”
As part of the Better Futures Retrofit Accelerator, she is on a journey with 10 other clean tech startups to bring innovative solutions to London’s built environment that can reduce greenhouse gases significantly. The accelerator aims to aid climate start-ups and early-stage scale-ups to innovate, grow and create jobs. Imperial College London-led programme aims to enable potential innovative climate tech SMEs to bring significant impact in reducing greenhouse gas emissions within the built environment retrofit sector.
Follow updates of the programme on LinkedIn here
Lived experiences create holistic solutions
What inspired Preethi to innovate in the clean technology sector mirrored challenges from her own life. She reflects, “My own lived experience of living in social housing for over two years inspired me to start Anzen with my co-founder Dhruv Shah, crafting a solution that can tackle indoor air pollution. Our goal at Anzen is to tackle poor indoor air quality and indoor heating inefficiency for all households.” Today, her passion is the driving force for her and co-founder Dhruv Shah to create accessible solutions for all households with a commitment to tackling indoor air pollution and heating inefficiency.
As a design engineer, she has contributed to the clean tech landscape with several start-ups from electric vehicle control to outdoor air pollution control units. Her recent work includes collaborations with professors at Imperial College London to develop a novel microbial energy system using brewery waste through magnetotactic bacteria and magnetism. As Chief Technology Officer at Anzen, Preethi brings her expertise as an Instrumentation and Control engineer. She has also been awarded the Futures Thinker Award by the Distributed Design Awards‘23, funded by the European Union.
Follow Anzen | Follow Preethi’s journey on LinkedIn
Preethi’s vision extends beyond decarbonisation as her team works to improve the scope of their solution to all households. Commenting on her need to integrate diverse needs, she said, “What inspired me to work in the clean tech space was simply the lack of human-centered and planet-centered solutions. Solutions that can not only decarbonise the planet but also be accessible and affordable to a larger section of people.”
Powered by Imperial College London, via Undaunted and Enterprise, the Better Futures Retrofit Accelerator is part of the Greater London Authority’s Better Futures programme, co-funded by the UK government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.
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Undaunted is a partnership between Imperial’s Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment and The Royal Institution.
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