Here is a paradox nobody talks about at the electronics store. The one appliance most of us rely on to survive the Indian summer may also be making that summer worse.

For millions of Indians — from factory workers to schoolchildren — escaping the heat isn’t even an option.

A conventional air conditioner uses 6.5 times more electricity than necessary, leaks refrigerant gases that are hundreds of times more potent than CO2, and throws waste heat right back into the street outside your window. The more we cool ourselves, the hotter the world gets. We are, quite literally, making the planet hotter in order to stay cool. For decades, this felt like a problem without a solution.

The IPCC's latest assessment tells us that by 2050, parts of India will regularly see temperatures crossing 50°C. There had to be another way to cool ourselves without warming the planet. A Hyderabad-based startup called Ambiator believes it has found one.

Tiger Aster is the kind of engineer who cannot walk past a problem without trying to take it apart. An interdisciplinary engineer and IT professional who had already built and run multiple ventures, Tiger had spent years in the world of hardware, fluid dynamics, and climate systems. But it was not a laboratory experiment or a research paper that finally pushed him to act; it was watching people work through Indian summers with no real way to cool down, on factory floors, classrooms, and small shops where the heat simply lingered.

"I kept seeing how heat was destroying productivity, health, and basic dignity for workers and students who simply could not afford conventional cooling," he recalls. The gap between what technology could theoretically do and what was actually available to most Indians had always bothered him.

When he began exploring the science of evaporative cooling more seriously, he realised that an old thermodynamic principle, using the latent heat of evaporation to cool air, had been massively underutilised, particularly in Indian climate conditions.

"The cooling problem is the most underfunded climate crisis in the subcontinent. We just weren't looking at it that way."

"The cooling problem is the most underfunded climate crisis in the subcontinent. We just weren't looking at it that way."

His co-founder, Jeeten Desai, known to everyone as JD, brought a different but complementary energy to the table. A BE in Electronics and a PGP from the Indian School of Business, JD had spent over 15 years working across global markets in entrepreneurship and business development before returning to India. 

He came back with one conviction: that the cooling crisis in India was not just a market opportunity but a moral one. Together, the two founders bring over 45 combined years of experience spanning cooling technology, engineering, supply chains, finance, and governance.

In October 2022, they........

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