Naava Founder Aki Soudunsaari: "It's Not Normal to Live Without Nature"

Aki Soudunsaari is founding partner, and chief entrepreneurial officer, of Naava, a Helsinki, Finland-based startup building “active green walls” that clean air with plants and technology. Despite what President Trump says, Finland has the cleanest air of any country on earth – and Naava wants to bring its health benefits to offices, classrooms and indoor spaces worldwide.

Since its foundation in 2011 Naava has won over $6m in funding, and sold walls in multiple territories. Production is based in Springfield, NJ. In this interview Soudunsaari, a former teacher, tells Red Herring about his company’s founding difficulties, disrupting three industries at once, and how Naava’s ultimate goal isn’t Trump’s America, but Asia.

What were Naava’s biggest initial roadblocks, and how did you overcome them?

As we were creating a completely new line of industry, biological i.e. natural air purification, which hadn’t been done before, and combined nature and technology in a new way, we faced a lot of doubt. Clean air in a natural way – Can’t be done, many said. Our customers and potential customers would talk about Naava to different experts, who didn’t know our product and the experts would not see how something like that is even possible.

We then contacted over 100 different industry experts from health; built environment; and air purification, and asked them: Why wouldn’t this work? This way, they saw how it worked, gained their trust and gathered a lot of industry knowledge.

Why did you choose to base production in the United States?

In 2016 the pioneer of human-friendly buildings, US wellness real estate and technology company Delos, vetted different green wall manufacturers and found our solution to be the most advanced. They invested in us and wanted us to partner in the US. The size of the market, with health and tech-oriented companies, attracted us – as well as the fact that making it in Asia, our future market, is easier if you’ve proved you can be successful in the US.

Delos is based in New York and we found suitable production facilities in New Jersey – it’s close to Tesla, for example – and set up shop there. If you make it here, you can make it anywhere.

Does it surprise you how little companies are aware their working environments can be bad for staff? Which countries have been most receptive to your solution?

By far the most receptive were schools, where teachers and students were suffering from bad indoor air. Also tech companies, which need to provide their employees the best possible work environment due to the competition for best talent. It was obvious for us that the early adopters who are interested in new innovations would be the first to test Naava.

One thing we’ve also noticed is that the people in the Nordics are the most health-conscious people in the world. Here the work-life balance is very good, and companies see the value in having happy employees: they are more productive than unhappy people. We’re aware that the rest of the world is not there yet.

How difficult is it to find the right distribution channels for such an innovative product?

We’re disrupting three markets: indoor air, furniture and interior landscaping. It’s definitely difficult to find partners who can handle everything. It’s easier to find sales partners and service partners separately.

Which regions are you eyeing right now, as those with the biggest potential for Naava’s success?

Asia is definitely our ultimate goal. We’re now expanding to US west coast, and also looking into the European markets. We will have announcements on Asia before end of this year.

Is Nordic air really all that great?

Yes it is! The World Health Organization has, several times, determined that Finland, and the Nordics overall, have the purest air in the world. Even though Trump tried to claim otherwise recently! However, despite having the cleanest air outdoors, we in the Nordics – as for example, Americans – spend a whopping 90% of our days indoors. That’s over 21 hours a day! We basically lock that pristine natural air outside. And indoors we breathe man-made air via ventilation and air-conditioning systems and slowly breathe in chemicals from furniture, coatings, paints, wallpaper, glues, aerosols, perfumes, cleaning products and technical equipment such as computers.

Another thing is the absence of green nature indoors. It’s not our normal habitat to live in a setting without nature and that has many psychological and physical effects on us people. Our mission is to reconnect humanity with nature. We’ve gotten too disconnected in recent decades.