Engineering India's
Zero-Emission Future.

In November 2017, a tragic, smog-induced multi-car pile-up on the Yamuna Expressway caught national headlines. For Indore college students Harsh Neekhra, Divyank Gupta, and Gagan Tripathi, it was a turning point.

Driven by the conviction that India's air pollution was an engineering problem left unsolved, they began prototyping in a small room without any funding or industry contacts. By April 2019, their mission materialized into Novorbis Itus Pvt Ltd, a company built with a single goal: creating emission control technology that actually works in the Indian condition.

The Yamuna Expressway pile-up exposed a daily, invisible crisis: millions of urban combustion sources, like industrial boilers and diesel generators, releasing fine particulate matter directly at breathing height. To investigate, the founders conducted a survey in Indore and found that average AQI at human breathing level was significantly above safe limits.

India relies on over two million diesel generators for critical backup power. Yet traditional emission controls haven't kept pace. Standard physical filters clog, increase engine backpressure, and demand constant, expensive replacements, leading operators to skip maintenance entirely.

Between 2017 and 2019, the three founders studied this persistent failure pattern. Their conclusion was clear: don't build a better filter: eliminate the filter entirely.

The team turned to electrostatics. Instead of physically blocking particles, they used a high-voltage electric field to charge and pull them out of the exhaust stream onto collection electrodes. The result: no filter, no clogging, no backpressure.

While electrostatic precipitation has existed since 1907, conventional designs were built for massive industrial smokestacks, not compact diesel generators. The team re-engineered the geometry into a cylindrical shell with a rigid central spike, creating a 360° electric field with zero dead zones that fits any existing generator without modification.

By July 2019, this core mechanism was finalised as Novorbis's Ionic Deposition Technology, the engine behind every product they build today.

On September 9, 2019, less than five months after founding Novorbis, the team was recognised by the Government of India as one of the country's Top 5 Innovators for their filterless air purifier. AICTE honoured them separately that same year.

This marked the first external confirmation of their breakthrough: the first filterless emission control device of its kind, engineered entirely in India without imported components or copied designs.

By October 2019, Novorbis was selected to represent India twice at the Innovation and Start-up Exchange Program in South Korea, gaining critical international validation and technical exposure.

In December 2019, Novorbis won both the Assocham Startup Launchpad and the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards (GSEA). By early 2020, they advanced to the EO GSEA Global Finals.

Their most meaningful milestone came from home, when they won the National Innovation Challenge by UNDP Youth Co:Lab and Niti Aayog, aligning the company directly with national climate policy. Consequently, Novorbis Itus was appointed Brand Ambassador for the MHRD Innovation Cell.

In December 2022, Novorbis secured its first commercial order, marking its transition from R&D to a viable market player.

To fuel expansion, the company closed a Pre-Seed A funding round in May 2023, followed by Pre-Seed B funding from NGIS and PONTAQ in November 2023. This capital enabled operational scale, prompting Novorbis to relocate its headquarters from Indore to Pune in October 2023 to embed itself in India's industrial and manufacturing belt.

By March 2024, the company formalised a landmark partnership with Greaves Cotton, a major industry signal validating their technology alongside one of India's most respected engine manufacturers.

In October 2024, surging market demand prompted Novorbis to significantly expand its Pune manufacturing facility. This physical growth matched the company's trajectory as it rapidly doubled its annual revenue. During the same pivotal month, Novorbis received TYPE approval from ARAI, proving its product met efficiency and regulatory standards.

Concurrently, the R&D team developed a new product category: the Crematoriums Air Purification System (CarbonFree CAPS). Urban crematoriums faced a unique compliance crisis, including National Green Tribunal (NGT) closure notices and community complaints about visible smoke, with no purpose-built solution available. Novorbis recognised the same regulatory and technological gap they had solved with diesel generators five years earlier and engineered a dedicated system.

Today, Novorbis has retrofitted over 114 diesel generator sets across India. Their client portfolio includes the Indian Army, Google, Tata Projects, and Adani Realty, serving sectors from real estate and data centres to heavy manufacturing.

What began as a single filterless device for diesel generators is now a comprehensive emission control platform. The current Novorbis portfolio includes:

Engineered and certified entirely in India, these systems meet strict compliance standards without relying on imported core technology.

Looking ahead, Novorbis is entering its next frontier: active R&D into Carbon Capture, Utilisation, and Storage (CCUS) to remove CO₂ directly from these same exhaust streams.