Founders Feature: Tanvi R Thombre, Co-Founder, Greenairy
Tanvi R Thombre (R) with fellow co-founder Lakshya Saraf (L).
1. Tell us about Greenairy. What does it do and who does it help?
Greenairy makes modular plant towers that clean indoor air in offices and teach students how to grow microgreens in the classroom. So we help 2 groups - people who breathe bad air at work, and students learning where food comes from.
The WHO ranks indoor air pollution as a leading environmental health risk. When we tested offices, we found carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds and humidity above healthy levels. Conventional air purifiers handle dust well but do little for gases. Plants handle gases, and our towers speed up that process.
Sustainability education booth
In schools, the same towers do something different. Students use them to grow microgreens - a way into urban farming that fits inside a classroom, no garden plot required. Sproutastic, our webapp, guides them through it and gamifies the process.
Sproutastic is a gamified sustainability education platform to empower youth (primary and secondary students) as changemakers. It combines interactive games, videos, classroom activities, and real-life challenges to connect kids to topics like urban farming, biodiversity, waste management, green energy and more. Students earn points, track progress, and connect what they learn to everyday actions. Teachers get sustainability content that's easy to drop into science/geography/CCE/ALP lessons.
Sproutastic app
2. What led you to start Greenairy?
We started with the air quality tower, after facing poor indoor air quality in the university makerspace. As we showcased our tower, students kept asking us - "can this grow herbs?" - which led us to explore how we could use the tower innovatively for urban farming in schools.
Some Singaporean students believe "food comes from the supermarket". We wanted them to get hands-on experience so they could better appreciate nature and resources.
Classroom sharing on urban farming around the world
Microgreens turned out to be the perfect crop for lighting that spark. They grow within 10 days, come in many tasty varieties, and can be eaten straight off the tower without cooking. Most importantly, students can run the whole cycle themselves, without adding to teachers' workload. No existing product was built for this, so we built it.
3. How does Greenairy use technology to increase impact?
In offices, added airflow through the root zone speeds up how quickly plants break down gases. In schools, the same design gives students a working farm on a footprint the size of a filing cabinet, without having to worry about lighting, watering, and ventilation of their microgreens.
The Sproutastic app is the education layer. Students can log their crops, follow each growth stage, and track their harvests. It also lets us extend the hands-on experience into broader sustainability learning.
Sproutastic modules
4. How is GoodHub SEA supporting your work?
GoodHub SEA built the login backend for Sproutastic. A classroom app needs secure and simple to manage accounts for every student, and the GoodHub SEA built an elegant backend infrastructure for us. Students can now log in, and the result is that we can start tracking their points to gamify their sustainability education journey.
The team also took the time to teach me about how the backend works, the language of backend development, and considerations when choosing between backend services. As a hardware-focused founder, I appreciated this a lot.
Sustainability education booth
5. What’s one thing that keeps you hopeful about the future?
The energy of the youth. GoodHub SEA and Greenairy exist because there are youth who feel empowered to do something about the future. Every time I see a student excited about harvesting their first crop, I see that same energy. I hope that we can inspire and educate many more youth through our work.
Our ‘Founders Feature’ series goes behind the scenes with people in Southeast Asia who are tackling real problems in their communities in creative and courageous ways. No jargon, just real talk and real impact.