From Potential to Progress: The Maashal Fellowship Story of GreenBreathe Innovations

Young innovators often need more than an idea to create meaningful change—they need the right support, resources and mentorship. Through its Maashal Fellowship, M3M Foundation supported GreenBreathe Innovations in turning an air-quality innovation into a working solution, demonstrating how purposeful investment in youth can help transform promising ideas into real-world climate action.

How M3M Foundation’s support is empowering young innovators to build home-grown climate solutions for a more sustainable future

The most meaningful outcomes of a fellowship are not always measured at the moment it is awarded. Sometimes, its real success becomes visible months later—when an idea has evolved, a young team has grown in confidence, and a solution once presented as a possibility begins working in the real world.

The journey of GreenBreathe Innovations (GBI) is one such story.

A year ago, founders Sanjana Dhavala and Roop Reddy presented their vision at the Triveni Awards, where their potential caught the attention of M3M Foundation. Through the Maashal Fellowship, M3M Foundation chose to support their experimentation and provide them with the resources and guidance to take their idea forward.

Today, that support has culminated in HEXA, an intelligent air-quality monitoring system developed by the young innovators and set up within the M3M Foundation office space.

For M3M Foundation, this is more than the evolution of a product. It is a tangible outcome of a fellowship built around a larger purpose: empowering young minds, nurturing home-grown innovation and enabling solutions that can contribute to a more sustainable future.

Recognising an Idea Before It Became a Solution

In a world where climate change, rising temperatures and deteriorating air quality are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, environmental innovation needs to move at the pace of the challenge.

India’s air-quality concerns have made monitoring, data and informed intervention increasingly important. National efforts such as the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) have placed stronger air-quality monitoring and targeted mitigation at the centre of the country’s clean-air agenda. 

Yet meaningful environmental action also requires young innovators who are willing to look at familiar problems differently.

That is what M3M Foundation saw in Sanjana and Roop.

Their initial idea centred around air purification. For the founders, however, the subject was deeply personal. Roop’s experience with nasal deviation had made breathing difficult, while Sanjana too had experienced breathing-related challenges. These experiences encouraged them to look more closely at the air people breathe every day—and eventually ask a larger question: before we can improve the air around us, can we understand it better?

The question opened a new direction for their work.

The Maashal Fellowship: Creating Room to Experiment

Through the Maashal Fellowship, M3M Foundation provided GBI with a ₹5 lakh grant, giving the founders the financial support required to take their concept into product development.

The grant enabled work across hardware, sensing technology, electronics, product architecture and an integrated digital dashboard.

But the fellowship was never only about funding.

It gave the founders an ecosystem in which they could experiment, listen, adapt and build. Through their engagement with M3M Foundation, they gained a deeper understanding of the intersection between environmental sustainability, technology, CSR, real estate and institutional responsibility.

This reflects the larger vision behind the Fellowship under Dr. Payal Kanodia, Chairperson & Trustee, M3M Foundation—to identify emerging talent, create opportunities for young innovators and help promising ideas develop into meaningful solutions.

In this sense, the Maashal Fellowship is not simply an award or a grant. It is an enabling platform—one that gives young people the confidence and space to transform their ideas into action.

From Purifying Air to Making It Measurable

The evolution of GBI’s thinking eventually led to HEXA.

An IoT-enabled indoor air-quality monitoring system, HEXA tracks parameters including PM2.5, PM10, CO₂, TVOCs, temperature, humidity and noise. Its integrated dashboard enables monitoring, analytics, alerts and reporting, helping users gain a clearer understanding of indoor environmental conditions.

This shift—from simply addressing air quality to understanding it through data—is central to the significance of the innovation.

Air pollutants are often invisible. People may not know what they are breathing, how conditions are changing or what factors are affecting the quality of the air around them.

HEXA seeks to change that by making environmental conditions visible, measurable and easier to understand.

Such technology can complement the larger national focus on air-quality monitoring and evidence-based action. It can help institutions look more closely at their own indoor environments and make informed decisions around factors such as ventilation, maintenance and workplace conditions.

The technology, therefore, becomes part of a wider sustainability conversation—one where data can support awareness and better environmental management.

When Fellowship Support Becomes a Real-World Outcome

The launch of HEXA on the auspicious occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi marked a significant milestone in GBI’s journey.

But the more meaningful milestone came with its deployment within the M3M Foundation office space.

For the founders, this represents a transition from development to real-world application. It gives them an opportunity to observe the system in an operational environment, understand its performance and continue refining the technology.

For M3M Foundation, it offers something equally valuable: the opportunity to see the outcome of its fellowship support take shape within its own ecosystem.

This is what makes GBI’s story particularly relevant as a fellowship success story. The journey demonstrates a clear progression—from an idea recognised at the Triveni Awards, to fellowship support, focused development, mentorship and finally a working solution entering a live environment.

Empowering Youth to Build for India’s Future

At the heart of this journey is a larger belief in the potential of India's youth.

When young innovators are given access to resources, mentorship and an ecosystem that encourages experimentation, they can create solutions rooted in India’s own challenges and aspirations.

In that sense, initiatives such as the Maashal Fellowship contribute to the broader spirit of Make in India—encouraging home-grown ideas, technology and entrepreneurial capability to address challenges within the country and beyond. India’s national innovation ecosystem increasingly places young entrepreneurs and technology-led solutions at the centre of its growth story. 

For M3M Foundation, supporting such innovators is also about investing in the future: a future where young people are not merely recipients of opportunity, but creators of solutions.

Dr. Aishwarya Mahajan, Managing Trustee & President, M3M Foundation, played an important role in guiding the founders as their idea evolved. His mentorship encouraged them to look beyond product development, understand market possibilities and consider how their work could create broader environmental value.

The founders’ progress—from meeting the Foundation at the Triveni Awards to developing and deploying HEXA—reflects the value of that sustained engagement.

A Fellowship That Has Begun to Deliver on Its Promise

GreenBreathe Innovations’ story demonstrates that the success of a fellowship is not defined only by the support extended at the beginning. It is reflected in what that support enables over time.

An idea becomes stronger. A young team becomes more capable. A prototype becomes a product. And a product begins finding its place in the real world.

That is the journey M3M Foundation has witnessed with GreenBreathe Innovations.

For Dr. Payal Kanodia’s vision of empowering young innovators and enabling sustainable development, the Maashal Fellowship represents a way of turning that vision into action—by backing potential, nurturing entrepreneurship and creating pathways for climate-focused ideas to grow.

HEXA’s deployment at the M3M Foundation office is therefore not an endpoint. It is a milestone that demonstrates what can emerge when young ambition meets purposeful support.

And perhaps that is the most meaningful measure of the Maashal Fellowship’s success: not simply that an idea was supported, but that it was given the opportunity to become something real.