Today, we are proud to launch the new HIVE!
It's smaller, performs better, is autonomous, and also 30% more affordable.
Get yours today on https://www.praan.io https://x.com/i/article/2105242511132540928
Bringing HIVE to more spaces
In 2026, over 2 million people will breathe cleaner air in spaces powered by the Praan HIVE. Across more than 1,500 locations in 8 countries. We now want to scale that number to 200 million people, and eventually, 8 billion.
Today, we are launching the new HIVE at ₹49,999, all-inclusive ($520).
The new HIVE is 62mm smaller, more capable, autonomous, and 30% more affordable than its predecessor. All of this without compromising on performance. Read on to see all that's new.
Background
At CES 2023 in Las Vegas, Praan first unveiled an early prototype of HIVE, our medical-grade indoor air purification platform. Very few features of the product worked, the acoustics had not yet been tuned, and the processes required to commercially manufacture it were yet to be put in place. So why show it?
Air purifiers had existed for decades, yet they were still not present in every room, in every indoor space. The problem was not lack of awareness. It was a lack of trust and experience. Since people couldn't feel the difference, they often didn't know if their purifier was actually working. Most schools never taught us air-quality units like µg/m³, ppb, ppm, etc., which meant we never built the visualisation muscle to make sense of the language air purifiers spoke to us in. To make matters worse, different air purifiers would often show different numbers when placed next to each other in the same room. This was the second breach of trust. People couldn't feel the difference, and they couldn't trust the data either.
We wanted HIVE to solve both, and then become the default air infrastructure in a room, serving the customer for years.
Before HIVE, we were solving much more severe air pollution.
In 2022 and 2023, Praan was producing the MKII and MKII Mini, our industrial-scale filterless air purification systems built primarily for factories. In some of these environments, particulate matter concentrations exceeded 100,000 µg/m³. These were spaces where air pollution directly affected how people worked, how machines operated, and how efficiently these factories could operate.
By the time we started building HIVE, we had already spent years understanding particle movement, airflow, filtration, sensing, reliability, and what it takes to continuously clean very polluted spaces. HIVE was our way of bringing those learnings into the spaces people spend most of their lives in.
Homes. Offices. Schools. Cafés. Hotels. Clinics. Bedrooms. Any indoor space.
Then people started buying more than one
By late 2024, Praan had shipped the first few hundred HIVEs. The product love was overwhelming. For the first time, customers could feel the difference, and now they wanted one in every space they occupied.
Some customers bought as many as 37 HIVEs within the same year. They would gift it to the people they loved.
That told us something important. HIVE was not being treated like a gadget people bought once and forgot about. It was becoming infrastructure inside the spaces people lived and worked in.
If someone experienced better air in one room, they wanted it in another. Then another. Then across the office. Then across multiple locations.
From regular homes to those of billionaires, athletes, actors, musicians, industrialists. Some doctors around India organically started recommending the HIVE exclusively to sensitive patients.
That is how HIVE has now grown to more than 1,500 locations across 8 countries, with $0 in ad spend.
However, we were not satisfied, because at INR 80,000+ after taxes ($999 then), we knew we were still missing out on reaching millions of homes.
Compromise is not in our DNA. We simply can't ship junk.
While designing HIVE, we were very clear that we would make no compromises on quality while selecting the materials used to craft the product. We wanted users to LOVE their HIVE.
The first step was to use the highest filtration standard and then bring it to every room: HEPA14 - Often used in operating theatres. Most consumer purification companies would shy away from using HEPA14 because not only was it expensive, but the fans needed to extract performance from it were incredibly expensive and loud.
For comparison, HEPA14 allows 10x lower particle penetration than HEPA13 (often used in traditional purifiers). HIVE's HEPA14 has been tested against microbes and particles as small as 0.015µm, while traditional systems claim protection up to 0.3µm.
After the particle filter, we focused on the gas filter. The truth is, when you move air really quickly through a purifier, the pollutant gases don't get enough time to react with the gas filter, which is why most air purifiers are pretty terrible at removing VOCs from the air.
To solve this, we doped our activated carbon filter with a catalyst that sped up the reaction rate to ~7x that of traditional activated carbon systems. Interestingly, this was designed and implemented by an intern last year who visited our India HQ for her internship over the summer.
Air purifiers have had no real feedback loop. Customers are often left guessing, and basic graphs/datapoints don't build trust. HIVE is equipped with a comprehensive environmental sensing stack combined with a health-platform that is able to directly correlate its impact with your exposome and wellbeing. This daily and then weekly feedback loop is what helped build trust among thousands of Praan users.
Apart from other intelligent features, we consciously chose to use aerospace-grade aluminium, so that HIVE remained light, but also lasted users for several years. The fact that it made every device look beautiful was the icing on the cake.
The cost of the bill of materials of the first two generations of HIVE (2024 and 2025) exceeded the sales price of most high-end air purifiers on the market.
Making it more affordable (despite global supply chain shocks)
This required a complete engineering redesign.
We changed how air interacted with each surface within the product, redesigned curved plates and fan interactions so that each fan delivered more useful clean air than its predecessor, without changing the part.
We found 62mm of space through optimisation within each HIVE.
62mm doesn't sound like much, but when your product is built from aluminium, those 62mm compound across raw material costs, machining, bending, finishing, shipping, packaging and almost every process that touches the enclosure.
These 62mm went a long way in bringing down the amount of aluminium and all the processes that would go into making the HIVE, still Praan standard. But when we did this, we couldn't stop ourselves from adding more to make the product even better, smarter, more accurate in reporting, and most importantly, autonomous.
We then took on the risk, and bought a very large volume of each part to benefit from economies of scale. However, just as we were about to process payments for these materials, costs for the grade of aluminium we were using went up by almost 250% completely shelving our plans. The new HIVE was even more expensive than the previous HIVE. Months of hard work, tossed away by a war.
At this point, we were left with a choice: build a sustainable, profitable business or change something in the world. As one of our investors described it, we were caught between being businessmen and being mission-driven founders. We chose to stick to our roots and to pursue our mission. We absorbed the supply chain shocks, slashed profit margins, and, through delicate negotiations, and investments in different manufacturing processes, we were able to create the HIVE just as we wanted, without compromise, at our target price.
So what exactly is new?
A lot. Let's discuss it visually.
1. HIVE is now 62mm smaller
2. HIVE now has a physical touch bar for you to interact with it
3. We have added 4 more operating speeds to further optimise performance and acoustics
4. HIVE automatically switches between Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to ensure you're always connected and never face a connectivity blackout.
5. You can now service the HIVE in less than 2 minutes with automated filter detection and ROI calculation - know how many grams of pollutants HIVE prevented from reaching your bloodstream!
6. Sensors that auto-clean. Trust each datapoint.
7. We made it as beautiful inside as it is outside.
8. We built Praan's EDITH AI right into each HIVE! This is your personal health and automation assistant, available 24/7.
9. Your air is now on your home-screen, with the HIVE Widget
10. Your filter usage, made completely transparent. No guessing. And over the first 30 days, you can also see what it's removed from the air in your space, reported within the app!
Along with all OF these, we've added a large number of fun features that make using HIVE a joyful, easy, and trustworthy experience. The new HIVE is our first product launch this winter that requires no wall drilling, no installation, and works like magic right out of the box. The fastest upgrade to better living.
Over the next 90 days, Praan will reveal 3 additional new products that completely reshape the indoor air infrastructure beyond purification, to manage every aspect of air. For each of those products, HIVE will be the first node for you to bring the complete infrastructure home.
We've already started mass-producing the new HIVE. You can order it here, and we will commence deliveries globally starting October 10, 2026.
Welcome to a better quality of life.