I think the underlying picture here really is that I and my co-founder are both heavily affected by air pollution in Northern Thailand and are seeing how it affects the health of thousands of people.
We believe strongly that air quality monitoring should be affordable so that people from poorer regions and countries can afford air quality monitoring and thus protect their health by knowing when the air quality turns bad. This is one of the reasons why we open-sourced our air quality designs [1] and are working with many NGOs and Universities to bring accurate low-cost air quality monitoring to underserved communities around the world.
Since we are a self-funded company we do not have pressure to maximize profit but can work under the mantra "Impact first (and profit will follow if we do a good job)."
By the way, if you work in air quality research, we are currently running a global co-location test program and are interested in additional partners [2].