Digging a ditch in Honduras to install a water filter is hardly any means to solve third-world problems — but for Alexander Mittal, it led to a socially conscious career.
Innova Dynamics, the brainchild of Mittal, a 2007 Wharton and Engineering graduate, and Arjun Srinivas, a 2008 Wharton and Engineering graduate, relocated headquarters last September from the University City Science Center to San Francisco to continue work that earned them a “Top 25 Best Young Entrepreneurs 2010” title from Bloomberg Businessweek.
Innova, known for its antimicrobial-imbuing technology, plans to make a second move to a larger office in Mission Bay, Ca., where it will double its staff.
The company’s core feature, a patented technology called Innlay that infuses surfaces such as plastic and rubber, was developed at Penn’s Material Science and Engineering department in 2007.
“We wanted to use technology to solve major world problems and address serious market problems with technology,” said Mittal, Innova’s current chief executive officer.
Mittal founded Innova Dynamics — inspired by his senior project called Innova Materials — to boost the performance of certain materials to impact a broad range of fields including optics, electronics and water treatment.
Mittal’s idea originated in 2005 with a volunteer Engineers Without Borders trip to Honduras to help villages access clean water. While digging, Mittal thought of a new way water pipes might remove bacteria and microbes as drinking water traveled to remote places.
Mittal met up with three friends after returning to Penn including Srinivas, a classmate in the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology, to produce a plastic pipe that could kill bacteria in moving water.
After trips to Home Depot and hours of “messing around” with expensive tools in the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter, including an electron-scanning machine that could shoot electrons, Innova was born.
Mittal and Srinivas then examined the properties of plastic to see how it could be changed to absorb antimicrobial particles. As fifth-year Penn students, they created the first-ever plastic water pipe that could remove bacteria on a pipe’s inner surface as well as on the pipe’s top.
Wharton professor Ian MacMillan put Mittal in touch with Engineering student Jay Parekh, who was in his Societal Wealth Venturing class, and together they created Hydros Bottle — a water bottle with bacteria-killing capacities — that became a semi-finalist in the 2007 Dell Social Innovation Competition.
The company, in a matter of months, started distributing Hydros Bottles to Central America and West Africa.
“The thing about [Mittal and Srinivas] is that they are so committed and dedicated about what they are doing,” Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs Managing Director Emily Cieri said. “I think they took advantage of the opportunity. They ran into a situation, solved the problem and were able to make it a senior design project and leverage it into their life’s mission and goals.”
“I think it’s great for students to be aware of opportunities like this. They don’t happen everyday, but they can happen,” Cieri added.
Mittal said he and Srinivas are looking to expand their company to simultaneously profit and address social and educational issues.
Since Mittal and Srinivas’ graduations from Penn, Innova has shifted to creating applications for the medical field, particularly in the area of secondary infections, the fourth leading cause of death in the United States.
IonArmour — also Innova’s patented technology — has been used for a variety of purposes such as antibacterial yoga mats for Nike, for solar conductive surfaces and more recently for surgical facilities in harsh combat environments for the U.S. Army.
Mittal is one of 30,000 social entrepreneurs — business leaders who apply business practices for social causes — in the country.
“It’s an interesting challenge,” Mittal said. “At the end of our academic time at Penn, we made a pipe with a good level of performance, and we’ve taken it to the next level since.”
In San Francisco, Innova is hoping to grow in a region with a robust technology ecosystem that includes a strong presence of clean technology as well as biotech and medical technology.
For young entrepreneurs at Penn, Mittal recommended they consider Philadelphia as a place to find their foothold.
“I’ve liked everything about West Philly,” Mittal said. “At first, we took a location-agnostic approach. But Philadelphia is conducive to companies looking to prove themselves.”
As Innova joins the ranks of companies that have made it to the Bay Area, Mittal and Srinivas will use infection-proof surfaces to outfit state-of-the-art Navy and National Science Foundation facilities.
“I went to Penn because I wanted to be entrepreneur starting a company based on my own research.” Srinivas said. “I was set up to execute on that dream. I think as an entrepreneur, after all the all-nighters and work overtime, it’s worth it in the end because you are creating something the world has never seen before.”
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