Builders "buy outcomes, not sustainability."
Lead with performance and price; let the impact be the bonus, not the pitch.
Wricks copy the exact shape, size and feel of a clay brick — so masons change nothing.
Adoption comes from fitting the existing workflow, not asking people to relearn it.
The bricks turned out accidentally waterproof — now the "hero property."
Stay close enough to the product to notice the wins you never planned for.
A builder threw the bricks off a five-storey building to show they don't break.
In industries that trust their hands over decks, proof beats claims.
Moving from owning factories to contract manufacturing so a "localized" product can travel.
For physical products, the unlock is often the operating model, not the plant.
The cheapest building material on earth — the humble clay brick — is also one of the most polluting. Kunjpreet Arora grew up in Udaipur, the "Lake City of India," watching plastic, marble and construction waste pile up around the lakes and the Aravalli hills, and asked a different question with her co-founder Lokesh: could that waste become a resource? That became Angirus, and its product Wricks — a brick made from single-use plastic and construction & demolition waste, built to the exact shape, size and feel of a clay brick so masons don't have to change a thing.
We go deep into the material science — plastic as the binder, rubble as the filler, a 1:2:3 ratio borrowed from cement mortar — and the "3M" process of mixing, melting and molding. Kunjpreet explains why builders "buy outcomes, not sustainability," how Wricks turned out accidentally waterproof (its "hero property"), why one builder threw the bricks off a five-storey building to prove they don't break, and the roughly ₹8 per square foot saved on plaster.
It's also a candid look at building a deep-tech company with "no money, no experience, no mentorship," being a young woman in a male-dominated construction industry, and why Angirus is moving from owning factories to contract manufacturing so a "localized" product can scale.
Kunjpreet Arora's Highlights:
→ Co-founder & CEO of Angirus, maker of Wricks — bricks built from single-use plastic and construction & demolition waste
→ 200,000 Wricks deployed across India · 400+ tons of waste recycled · 100+ tCO₂e avoided
→ In-house manufacturing facility operational in Bangalore; 15+ livelihoods created for marginalized communities
→ WEF UpLink Top Innovator, PayPal Small Business Impact Award, and 2nd worldwide at the TiE University Global Pitch Competition · Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia