Jaya Rao started Molekule with her father and brother to commercialize a revolutionary air purification technology. As California wildfires raged through Sonoma and Napa counties in late 2017, Tim Worboys couldn’t set foot outside. The thick smoke posed a severe threat to his asthma, but even the indoor air quality was starting to worry him. That is until Worboys turned on his new air purifier, a magical device that instantly had him breathing more easily. Only it wasn’t magic at all. It was Molekule — a purifier that uses a new type of filter to scrub the air. The San Francisco-based clean air tech startup, led by its 32-year-old COO, Jaya Rao, is taking off, and just in the nick of time. Between 2014 and 2016, the annual national air quality report card from the American Lung Association found that more than one in four Americans live in counties with unhealthful levels of particle or ozone pollution — putting them at risk for asthma attacks and lung cancer, among other diseases. Using Molekule’s advanced air purification technology, Rao wants to bring clean air to more people throughout the country — and globally — before environmental conditions deteriorate further. Rao grew up in Gainesville, where her father, Yogi Goswami, worked as an engineering professor at the University of Florida. Her parents emigrated from India in the early 1970s and raised Rao and her younger brother, Dilip Goswami, with native cultural influences — from traditional foods to classical Indian dance, which Rao still performs. Following in their father’s footsteps, the siblings enrolled at the University of Florida, where Rao studied mechanical engineering and Goswami pursued electrical and computer engineering, and then both earned graduate degrees at Stanford. | 