Startup Interview with Muhammad Bilal, BreatheIO - CEO/Founder

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

Working in the technology industry for 10+ years by adapting to changes in it, I have worked in 50+ different programming languages by developing and deploying in most cases at least one project per language. That allowed me to break the language barrier and absorb the diversity of technology. I am Founder at BreatheIO, PGP AI/ML Data Science, Full Stack Developer, Hardware Engineer, Philosopher and Author of Make me a Programmer: The Independent Entrepreneur. Most recent qualification is a Post-Graduation in AI/ML from the University of Texas at Austin.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

My startup is called BreatheIO. BreatheIO is a Smart Air Purifier that utilizes the power of Artificial Intelligence to reduce and control air pollution, increasing the longevity of human life.

What is the origin story?

It all started back in 2015, when I encountered the first happenings of smog in Pakistan. It was fog at first, the very beauty that dims the street lights by diffusing it making it perfect for night life candid photography, but there was a catch to it.

It reeked of the smell of diesel. The smell was awkward but it really didn’t bother me. I used to offer voluntary service at the children’s hospital at that time. Usually we had cases mostly related to stomach, but with the very appearance of this new ghost in our city, it wasn’t much time that cases of throat infection, bronchitis and chest congestion started coming in for children under 6 months of age.

Next year, we had more and more cases this time involving adults, and it took till 2018 for the world to realize that we are undergoing climate change. The awareness was there but no one explicit enough was working on a solution. There is the theory known as the chaos theory which states that the randomness of chaotic systems which make it complex have underlying patterns or connectedness, a kind of self-organization. The butterfly effect is one of its principles that describes that small changes in one state of a chaotic non-linear system can result in large differences in later state.

A metaphor would be that a butterfly flapping its wings in Lahore can cause a hurricane storm in China. Therefore, putting that principle to practice, I started searching instruments that could fix the air pollution.

I found air purifiers but after going through the reviews and feedbacks of their users, people bought it but were unable to verify whether it was actually changing their environment or not. It’s like when you have a fever you need an instrument to tell you how hot you are.

They had to go buy an extra instrument to monitor the change in the environment. This is where BreatheIO was born. BreatheIO is a Smart Air Purifier that utilizes the power of Artificial Intelligence to reduce and control Air Pollution.

The standards of air quality measured are based on the sampling of air with respect to the amount of 2.5 micron-sized particles in it for a given sampling time. Your single hair is around 50 microns in diameter.

This is quite an inaccurate measure of air quality and our smart air purifiers at BreatheIO base their air quality measures on the measure of six different gases which are Carbon Monoxide, Carbon Dioxide, Ammonia, Alcohol, Acetone and Toluene in the air. This is a new measure of air quality that BreatheIO is registering.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

A team by definition is a collection of people, coming together for a common goal. Sometimes you do not decide to form a team but people come together because they resonate with the same goal.

The one thing I love about my team is that we didn’t choose each other based on the individual skillset we brought to BreatheIO but because we chose to help each other with the problems that all of us have individually solved. The team is not based on a transactional relationship but more based on contributive analysis of how much can one help another to achieve greatness.

Now to answer why are we the ones to solve the problem, I believe you don’t choose the problems that needed to be fixed, rather than the problem chooses you for your compatibility of fixing it.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

I’d still be building a startup.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We have 118 early adaptors using our technology, with more than 5 nominations in multiple awards around the globe for our startup, and a company interested in becoming a distributor by placing an order of 10.000 devices. Apart from that an initial investment of 100,000 Canadian Dollars was offered by 2 individual companies. I find that this is pretty much an embodiment of success.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

The most exciting part is that you begin to realise that everything that you have ever done and will ever do, might seem to you very small. But once the world knows about it, you will surely realise how big you are.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

The technology that excites me is the fusion of Internet of Things and the Cloud. The cloud has provided the perfect landscape for bypassing the limits that we once used to have because of the limits of hardware that governs the basic layer of all the technological revolution that has occurred in the last 30 years.

I believe that everything we see around is legacy hardware, from your hair drying, washing machine, air conditioning and much more.

All this will eventually connect to the cloud and share data and information. The next 20 years are all about the cloud revolution and Internet of Things is a big part of it.

Based on my experience in the software industry, I believe that software development as a whole is very much diluted. The traditional way of developing and deploying in house solutions has already been verified as the major pothole in any company, business or organisation to scale.

Therefore, the future will be for those who are Jack of all trades and masters of none. Specialisation will get you at a dead end, one needs more than one road to move forward.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

I have been writing technical articles as a contribution to the community online, that has allowed me to develop and become what I am using Hackernoon as a platform.

At Hackernoon, I was nominated in five categories for 2020 Noonies Awards which landed me with three awards. This made me publish my own book, titled, Make Me a Programmer – The Independent Entrepreneur on Amazon.

This puts me in a league of becoming an author which would certainly not have been possible without the great support and minimized communication gap from the Hackernoon team behind the platform.

Any living thing needs just a little care, and you will be amazed at what a beauty it can become.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Dear Boy, you are in the era where the magic happens. All magic is technology, and if you can get a hold of it, you`ll be amazed and how many Merlin’s of this time will emerge. Therefore, always remember whatever your mind produces, if you stick long enough with it, it is bound to become your reality.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

The biggest achievements are small beginnings and all things take time, so develop patience in you to the point that you become an immovable object towards any unstoppable force.