Airlabs

Supporting Airlabs’ clean air mission.

Airlabs is developing clean air zones throughout the world's most polluted cities.

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Global challenge – Air pollution

With 91% of the world's population living where air pollution exceeds safe limits**, we meet CEO Marc Ottolini, to find out how Airlabs is tackling the greatest problem facing our cities today – air pollution.

Read the video transcript

Marc Ottolini – CEO, Airlabs
00.03 Air pollution is the biggest environmental health problem that we have around the world. The mission of Airlabs is to reduce the air pollution exposure for as many people around the world as we can. We have 1.4 billion cars around the world who are all driving around with inadequate air pollution protection. So we’ve said let’s start with vehicles.

Dassos Alexandrou – Relationship Director, Barclays
00.24 What we’re doing here today is launching a fleet of black cabs installed with Airlabs clean air filtration devices.

Marc Ottolini – CEO, Airlabs
00.32 The product takes in the dirty air, the air then goes through several different filters, to eliminate the different types of pollutants, then the clean air is being blown out through these outlets and taking the clean air back to where people breathe it in.

Dassos Alexandrou – Relationship Director, Barclays
00.52 Barclays have maintained their relationship with Airlabs for the last five years; through that time, we’ve supported their business with a full suite of transactional banking, products and services.

Marc Ottolini – CEO, Airlabs
01.01 They’ve also introduced us to Unreasonable Impact where we have access to a global network of like-minded entrepreneurs as well as investors.

Dassos Alexandrou – Relationship Director, Barclays
01.11 It’s an accelerator programme that seeks to support entrepreneurial businesses that are looking to create solutions for the world’s biggest societal issues.

Marc Ottolini – CEO, Airlabs
01.21 The relationship with Dassos is a very important one. He is looking with us, at what we’re doing commercially, and how we can enhance what we offer to customers in terms of our product and technology. He is very much a business partner.

Dassos Alexandrou – Relationship Director, Barclays
01.35 I regularly meet with Marc, to talk about what’s going on with Airlabs business; current research going on into air quality, and the technological advances that we’re seeing in this space. Airlabs have got huge growth ambition and I feel like I can really help them, with international trade, products and solutions.

Marc Ottolini – CEO, Airlabs
01.50 In five years’ time, we want to be as Airlabs, the global leader in air pollution control. We want to be seen as the place to go to, for people, when they have a problem with air pollution. A place where they know that they will find real solutions, from a company that they can really trust.

Supporting Airlabs Mission

Founded in 2014, Airlabs is developing clean air solutions for vehicles, buildings and cities.

Airlabs technology has been used to create clean air zones at London’s Marylebone Railway Station, in the Stella McCartney store on Old Bond Street and was used in Michael Pinsky’s ‘Pollution Pods’ installation at Somerset House.

How Barclays supports Airlabs

Having established a deep partnership from day one, Barclays understands Airlabs’ inspiring vision, and through our breadth of industry connections we’ve made useful introductions to support this innovative company.
Barclays provides Airlabs’ day to day banking and has started to lay the foundations for additional financial support.
To help tackle London’s concerning air pollution issue, for 12 weeks (3 July - 15 September 2019) we partnered with Airlabs to put a new fleet of clean air cabs on the streets of London.
Ten electric black cabs have been fitted with Airlabs’ unique nano-carbon technology, which is able to remove up to 95% of pollutants from inside the cab within 10 minutes.