How one observation became a global clean tech company

For Steven Jiang, founder and CEO of AIRINS, entrepreneurship grew from the overlap between engineering, curiosity and a desire to build something useful beyond the laboratory.

Steven moved from China to New Zealand at 16, going on to complete honours and masters degrees in mechatronics at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland. During his studies, one of his engineering professors offered advice that stayed with him.

“Mechatronics was still a relatively new field, and he pointed out that there weren’t many robotics jobs in New Zealand and that we needed to think about creating our own jobs,” Steven says.

The idea for AIRINS emerged from an everyday observation. Steven was the proud owner of a second-hand car that he kept scrupulously clean. When he was forced to park it in a different location, he noticed that it quickly became coated in dirt and dust.

This pointed to differences in air quality between nearby locations that were not obvious to most people, and Steven saw an opportunity to combine air-quality measurements with emerging drone technology.

That idea led to AIRINS, founded in 2016, and helped establish a new market for drone-based air-quality mapping.

Steven says AIRINS was the sole operator in its niche until 2019, when competitors began to recognise the opportunity.

Being an early entrant brought both opportunities and challenges, particularly the need to educate prospective customers about what AIRINS offered and demonstrate its commercial value at a time when the use and value of climate data were still being debated.

“We were the only business offering this mapping solution, but drones themselves were also still a new technology. We had a lot of people assume they just took pictures or wanted to know how long they would fly for. It was hard to get people to understand that we were actually mapping air quality.”

AIRINS has since expanded internationally. Despite the emergence of competitors, Steven says the company retains around 60 percent of its niche market, selling into China, North and South Korea, and Europe from its base in Singapore. It has been profitable since 2019, three years after its launch.

There have also been important lessons along the way.

“Product-market fit is really important. As engineers, it’s easy to focus on technical specifications and comparisons, but customers care about the workflow, the deliverables and the ultimate return on investment,” he says.

Another lesson from leading AIRINS through a changing geopolitical environment has been the importance of paying close attention to the wider market.

“I grew up in an era of globalisation, where money, talent and products flowed internationally. I didn’t expect that one day there would be a geopolitical shift away from that, which would affect our ability to access some markets.”

Steven is also grateful for lessons from his time at the University of Auckland that gave him a practical foundation for building AIRINS.

Engineering communication and systems courses within his undergraduate degree provided an introduction to accounting and international business fundamentals, helping him, as he puts it, “understand business in a more systematic way” without completing a formal business degree.

His entrepreneurial instinct, however, predates university. Steven traces it back to watching his father, a successful businessman.

“There were times when something wasn’t successful for him, so that would trigger me to think about what I would do differently.”

Today, Steven says one of the biggest changes that comes with success is that neither he nor the company is driven purely by survival. Instead, there is more space to think about purpose and the importance for founders of finding an overlap between their skills, market demand and personal interests.

“Having a vision is really important. Companies come and go, especially start-ups. Those companies that are really solving problems for humanity are the ones offering genuine value.”