“Pollution is personal” — Meet Romain Lacombe, CEO of Plume Labs

We caught up with Plume Labs CEO & co-founder Romain Lacombe to discuss their new air quality sensor, being data-driven and why he strapped sensors to pigeons.

Kieran Pradeep
HCVC

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Plume Labs’ Flow air quality tracker is the first wearable sensor to measure exactly what you’re breathing, from particulate matter to nitrogen dioxide to ozone. Plume Labs also offers real-time air quality reports via their App and API, using information pooled from a global network of monitoring stations and satellites.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

You’re developing a startup with a mission, can you describe it to us?

Romain Lacombe (RL): Few people know it but pollution happens to be the leading cause of avoidable death worldwide. Two thirds of environmental exposure premature deaths are estimated to come from air pollution as well according to the World Health Organisation. Making pollution understandable through open data was key for us.

Plume Labs have developed an app, an API and now Flow, a portable air quality sensor. How does each of your products make air pollution more visible?

The Flow air tracker.

RL: Plume’s mobile app gives a baseline of information on exposure to people, with live reports and forecasts of how pollution is going to change over the next 24h.

Plume’s view of London’s air quality.

We recognized early on that the key to what we were trying to build was not an air purifier or a mask. What was missing was better information on how to act. It’s silly in a way, we can get wearables that tell us how to be more active, to live better, but nothing tells us what we’re breathing.

Flow is basically a personal environmental information tool.

There’s also an opportunity to monetise these findings with the API. It’s just another form factor for accessing this information. Last year, we introduced an Alexa skill and a Google Home Action. Plume’s aim is to build a type of ubiquitous computing product that sends this information to you when you need it.

“It’s silly in a way, we can get wearables that tell us how to be more active, to live better but nothing tells us what we’re breathing”.

To be descriptive and predictive required you to develop both software and hardware?

RL: In a way, we’re a very unusual hardware company because we started off focusing on data. But we’ve learned how to make something as invisible as pollution understandable as a product. Flow is an environmental tracker, just like you have an activity or sleep tracker. It’s the first product to bring together all the different sensors that give a comprehensive vision of what you breath, as you move around the city. This, in turn, is a platform we can build on by analysing your habits to help you with recommendations.

Would you say it’s also a tool for spurring change?

RL: It’s a consumer device, designed for individual personal use but there’s a clear collective dimension to it. That’s what makes it very special. We start with the individual and personal exposure. With this leverage you can change your own behaviour to breathe better air. The underlying thesis of our theory of change is simple: as more and more people get better data they can map out what they’ve been exposed to. This information can support movements for change, activist groups or NGOs.

“It’s a consumer device, designed for individual personal use but there’s a clear collective dimension to it.”

Your career has taken you from École Polytechnique to MIT to working on opendata initiatives for the French government. What inspired you to become an entrepreneur?

RL: One common thread I saw across my career was that improving access to data makes things better. It’s true for how government transparency works, how public services can be made accessible and how innovation can happen.

Do you see your role as a mediator, using tech to lead change within global environmental or health policy?

RL: We’re working on something that challenges learned helplessness. Because, for many people, pollution seems like a fact of life. Like death or taxes! (Laughs) Most people don’t realize how much agency they have over their own exposure to these things. The best way to put data in the hands of the people is to help them tell a story.

“We strapped our sensors to pigeons and released them over London!”

However, we are still in pre-production, we’re taking pre-orders and we’re still at the stage where we are building this community of users. The classic consumer device story! That being said, one of the ways we want to have impact is on the App. We invested quite a bit of time last year on a way to grab the world’s attention. So we strapped our sensors to pigeons and released them over London!

Pigeon Air Patrol.

How important was that PR exposure to getting your message out there?

RL: It grabbed people’s attention and framed a problem and a solution. Our agency wanted to use pigeons because of the Twitter bird. There was this idea of the immediacy of access to information. We even had a veterinarian to ensure the birds were in a good condition. (Laughs) It took a few days for the media interest to peak but I’d never seen so many interview requests afterwards. It went completely viral. It’s something you can’t predict or repeat.

The harnesses.

Back in 2015, before we even had our backend or app up and running, we showed up at our office in Paris and saw pollution levels that were higher than in Beijing! We sent out a tweet and it exploded around the French twittersphere. We ended up on the national media that evening.

After four or five days of back and forth debate, it ended up triggering an even/odds scheme for cars entering Paris. This event showed how powerful data can be. Pollution is often intangible and hard to comprehend. The gist of it is if we can make the air visible then we can help people breathe better.

France24.

Is it enabling real-time environmental journalism?

RL: Yes, for instance we’ve seen a lot of excitement about the product from schools looking to evaluate the impact on children of fumes from parent’s cars at pickup time. There are all sorts of micro-level interventions that can be made into no-brainers once you have the data.

Hopefully what this product can become an enabler for this.

What is the most surprising insight you’ve gleaned from your data set already?

RL: Seeing Paris briefly peak as the most polluted city in the world was shocking. What’s interesting is how strongly variable pollution levels can be. Most of the variation is linked to weather patterns: it’s not that we always pollute more at a given time, it’s rather the pollution that becomes more concentrated than usual.

What direction do you see Plume Labs evolving?

RL: We think of Plume as a hardware-enabled data company, ¾ of our surveyed users have actually changed their behaviour thanks to our information. So we know that this works! The long term value from what we’re building is in our network of users. People who, in using these portable devices, gather an unprecedented dataset on personal pollution exposure across urban areas. Which is obviously interesting to urban-focused applications where the data we aggregate, forecast and build can be monetized. It’s also an incredible opportunity for gathering insights into what people actually breath.

“There’s an estimated half-order magnitude of difference in air quality between city blocks. Pollution is personal!”

In a city like Paris, we have about at most a dozen functioning roof-top air quality stations. This regulatory approach is basically measuring air quality for pigeons. Sure, it’s necessary to get a sense of magnitude of exposure. Yet it completely misses data for the 90% of time we spend in the home, on the street, in transit. There’s an estimated half-order magnitude of difference in air quality between city blocks. Pollution is personal!

What were the biggest challenges you had to overcome as an entrepreneur in hardware?

RL: What makes hardware challenging are the stakes of your decisions. In pure software, you can have short cycles of iterative processes. In hardware, somewhere you need to take a leap of faith, decide on the moulds and tooling to build a batch of a few thousand devices. When the cycles are much longer, you need to ask yourself “how do I fight against time?”.

The benefit of being a data driven company is we can accelerate our learning on the software side and focus on the experience of our community of users.

Finally, how did you first convince people to invest in you?

RL: We found an amazing investor, Dr. Laurent Alexandre, whose vision was aligned with ours from the moment we met. He understood that understanding exposure to environmental factors is the logical companion to understanding genetic and other health data.

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Writer for

Awkward N. Irishman in Paris, VC analyst & Tech Writer @Hardware_Club. I care about climate change, politics & the future of work.