When I first came across Air Aware Labs, something caught my eye. Air pollution is one of those crises that exists in plain sight, and yet remains largely invisible in our daily lives. You can’t see the nitrogen dioxide on your running route or the PM2.5 particles in your morning commute. And yet, they’re there, affecting everything from respiratory health to long-term risk of chronic disease.
Here was a startup doing something I hadn’t seen before: translating complex air quality data into something deeply personal. Not a red dot on a map. Not an abstract AQI number. But a tailored snapshot of how the air around you, your street, your run route, and your commute might impact your health. I knew I had to speak with Louise Thomas, the co-founder and CEO behind the mission.
What started as a local project in South London has since evolved into AirTrack, a global digital tool powered by open-source data and AI that enables people to track, interpret, and even reroute their exposure to air pollution. At its core, Air Aware Labs wants to make the invisible visible and give people real agency over what they breathe every day.
The Origins of Air Aware Labs
Louise didn’t set out to become an entrepreneur in air health tech. Her journey started with something far more familiar and relatable: a concerned parent looking out for her community.
Around 2019, she recalled, she worked with her daughter’s school on the air quality in the local area. At first, this was just a side project and a way to understand what the community was breathing in. Over time, her fascination with air quality work grew. A few years later, Louise found herself drawn to the issue and joined Breathe London, a citywide network of grassroots groups working on hyperlocal air monitoring, awareness, and policy. She quickly got involved with the South London chapter. Their first task? Install a monitor to start collecting real-time data.
Easier said than done. They ran into months of bureaucratic delays over planning permissions. “While we were kind of almost waiting for something to happen and to start getting the data stream, we thought we would establish a blog,” Louise said. It wasn’t the plan; it was just that the original plan wasn’t quite going to plan.
That improvised decision turned out to be a turning point. The blog became a way to demystify air quality data, share updates with the community, and build momentum around the issue. Essentially, about nine months later, the air monitor was finally installed in Brixton–open-source and still running today.
By then, Louise knew she wanted to go all in. She left her government job and joined a venture builder program, where she met her co-founder, an academic specializing in air pollution. Together, they launched Air Aware Labs.
The vision was clear: turn raw, highly variable air data into actionable, personalized insights. “The levels of pollution change so much,” Louise mentioned, “and yet people aren’t getting that information in a way that lets them do something about it. And as we know, it’s such a major health concern.”
From a schoolyard concern to a startup tackling a global public health challenge, Air Aware Labs was born out of equal parts curiosity and community.
Identifying the Gap: Personalized and Real-Time Pollution Insights
As Louise and her co-founder began to shape the foundations of Air Aware Labs, one truth stood out: air pollution is hyperlocal and highly dynamic, yet most people experience it through static, generalized data. The levels can vary dramatically even within the same neighborhood, but the information most people get is averaged across a whole city, or a single daily index that doesn’t reflect how they move through space.
This disconnect between real-world exposure and how data is typically delivered was the core insight that sparked AirTrack.
Rather than reinvent the wheel by building hardware, Louise and her team strategically decided to build on top of existing, robust air quality models like Breezometer (now integrated via Google’s API). That freed them to focus not on generating more data, but on personalizing it, delivering real-time, location-specific pollution insights based on how people live, move, and breathe.
At the heart of this approach is a belief that air quality is not a static number but a dynamic health factor that deserves the same level of personal relevance as ‘step counts’ or ‘heart rate’ data. By bridging environmental data with individual health contexts, Air Aware Labs is doing something radical in its simplicity: making the air feel human—not just measured, not just mapped, but made actionable.
Building AirTrack: From Strava to AI Integration
When it came to building AirTrack, the starting point was something runners and cyclists were already using: Strava.
The first product launched was an integration with Strava, Louise explained. Using Strava’s developer API, they pulled GPS coordinates from user activities–bike rides, runs, commutes–and matched those with air quality data. After a workout, users could see the pollution levels along their route, right inside their Strava feed.
It was a clever, low-friction way to test the idea: taking existing behavior, adding context, and returning something meaningful. But as they expanded the product, new challenges emerged, especially around how to present the data.
“There’s always that general challenge of figuring out what people really want,” Louise said. With air quality, you could easily overwhelm users with raw numbers and graphs. But that’s not really what most people want. They want it to be useful, not scientific.
In fact, some early feedback they received was that the product was too scientific. But simplifying air pollution data, especially across different countries and air quality standards, isn’t straightforward. Louise was skeptical of using standard AQI scores, calling them inconsistent and often misleading. Instead, AirTrack focuses on giving users access to the underlying data, presented in the most accessible way possible. The tension between scientific precision and user-friendly design has shaped AirTrack’s development.
In recent months, AI has become a bigger part of their toolset. On the backend, it’s helping them streamline workflows. But the real potential lies in expanding what AirTrack can do.
Their current AI project focused on low-pollution route recommendations, helping users not just understand pollution but actively avoid it. An AI specialist joined the team to lead this effort, training models to suggest alternative paths and minimize exposure without compromising on distance or convenience. Looking ahead, Louise sees AI playing an even bigger role: helping uncover the long-term relationship between health and exposure.
From Strava routes to smart reroutes, AirTrack is steadily evolving, from a passive data tool to an active health companion.
Growing Impact: Collaborations and Global Reach
What happens when you build a product people genuinely find useful… In Air Aware Labs’ case, over 2,100 users across 100+ countries, all with virtually zero marketing spend.
Much of this early traction came from the team’s decision to start with a Strava integration. Louise explained, “It immediately took us to a global audience.” With one strategic move, they leapfrogged the typical slow climb of early user acquisition. They reached a diverse, international community of fitness-minded users eager to understand the air they breathed.
Behind the scenes, Air Aware Labs has also been cultivating meaningful partnerships. Patagonia, for example, became an early ally. The outdoor brand’s Running Up For Air campaign aligned naturally with AirTracks’s mission, and Patagonia played a key role in promoting their launch.
Other partnerships have emerged in more policy—and planning-oriented spaces. The UK charity Sustrans, focused on active travel and urban development, has been working with Air Aware Labs to explore how cities can plan not just around pollution locations but also around personal exposure. This shift from thinking spatially to thinking experientially is central to AirTrack’s vision.
Looking forward, Louise and her team aim to deepen their impact by embedding AirTrack into more aspects of people’s lives, not just as a standalone app, but as a layer within fitness platforms, health apps, and chronic illness management tools, such as those for asthma. The idea is to meet users where they already are, and make air quality data as integral as steps, heart rate, or sleep.
Collaboration isn’t just nice-to-have in this work. It’s essential. And for Air Aware Labs, it’s been the fuel behind a quietly growing global movement.
Startup Lessons: Insights from a Mission-Driven Founder
Launching a mission-driven startup comes with its fair share of surprises and lessons. For Louise, one of the biggest eye-openers was how long everything takes.
Still, the journey hasn’t been all uphill. One unexpected bright spot? The support. “I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much collaboration is possible and how much support you get from the startup ecosystem,” she said, especially in the UK. “You’re definitely not alone.”
While Air Aware Labs works at the intersection of environment and health, Louise is intentional about how they frame their identity. We wouldn’t necessarily call ourselves climate tech. We try to put ourselves more in the health tech category, she explained. Environmental innovations often run into the ‘who’s going to pay?’ problem. Health tech makes the value proposition a bit more concrete.
That framing shift, away from abstract environmental benefit and toward personal, tangible health impact, has opened the doors for partnerships and potential investors. It’s a subtle but strategic move that other founders might do well to consider.
When asked what advice she’d offer aspiring entrepreneurs, Louise didn’t hesitate: “Understand what your users want. Fix a problem for someone.” It’s advice that’s simple in theory, but deceptively hard in practice. There are tons of good ideas, but the hard part is making them relevant to somebody. Especially with the growth of AI, there are so many things you could do, but you have to ask: which ones will be most valuable to others?
Her advice to young founders:
- Focus on real user problems
- Know your “why,” but stay flexible on the “how.”
- Don’t build for the sake of tech… solve something tangible
Final Reflections
There’s something quietly powerful about the work Louise and her team are doing.
In a world saturated with climate doom headlines and flashy tech solutions, Air Aware Labs offers a different kind of model: one rooted in grounded science, accessible design, and deeply human insight. It doesn’t scream disruption, nor does it demand attention, but it works.
What stood out most to me during our conversation was Louise’s clarity of purpose. Every design decision, every partnership, every product iteration is guided by a genuine desire to help people breathe better and live healthier lives. That may sound simple, but it’s rare.
AirTrack matters because it brings justice to a space where inequality thrives. Air pollution disproportionately harms the most vulnerable: children, low-income communities, urban residents, and people living with chronic illness. Tools like this give power back to individuals—power to understand, to make choices, and to advocate.
In a time when the lines between health and climate are becoming impossible to ignore, stories like Louise’s remind us that innovation doesn’t have to be loud. It just has to be real.
And that’s exactly what Air Aware Labs is building.