Getting an Early Start on Entrepreneurship: CarbonCLAIR
- Apr 7
- 5 min read
Updated: Apr 10
Anyone who’s ever said “Youth is wasted on the young” never met Fares Al-lahabi. The undergraduate co-founder of CarbonCLAIR, which is developing energy-efficient, mobile air purification, and chemical scrubbing system to promote sustainable air quality at construction sites and other hard-to-access settings, sees numerous advantages to being a young founder.
Al-lahabi found that despite the rules preventing undergraduates from participating in some entrepreneurship programs, there are upsides to their relative youth. “The biggest advantage is not just that people think it’s ‘cute’ that we are younger and want to help us,” he said. “We own our IP, and our college cannot claim it, unlike if you are in a master’s or PhD program and your college or university owns it. “I also think we are more open to ideas; we are more elastic in our thinking.”
Being open to possibility got Al-lahabi started on his entrepreneurial and education journey. Having grown up in Saudi Arabia, he came to the United States five years ago to study civil engineering at City College. “I was always interested in technology, but my knowledge was very general—I was really a Jack-of-all-trades,” he said. “It was challenging for me to choose a major. I joined a campus makerspace program, the City College Initiative to Promote Academic Success in STEM (CiPASS), that helped me to develop both hardware skills and soft skills as part of an undergrad team. I created a solution for a biomedical exoskeleton for a hand; that lead to an internship at Vyir Tech. Of course, Vyir is also an I-Corps-grad company led by founder James Scholtz.”
“That role was transformative for me,” he added. “I learned so much from James, and I experienced everything from project management and prototyping to learning about company culture and mentorship.”
Al-lahabi returned to CIPASS as a mentor, overseeing a dozen undergraduate teams—one of which became the origin of CarbonCLAIR. That’s when he connected with co-founders Nazarena Soria Hadad and Elsa Cobaj. “We were looking to improve the air quality in underground MTA subway stations,” he said. “We thought this was a problem that needed a solution. We built a prototype—again with support from James.”
With further research, the team realized their concept might have legitimate business potential; networking introduced them to I-Corps.
“We were selected to participate in a regional I-Corps as well as in a program at City College’s Zahn Innovation Center,” said Al-lahabi. “We did that first regional cohort in January 2024. We came in so excited to have the MTA as a customer; we did 20 interviews and were shocked to learn they were not interested. We created some great networks, but we knew that was not the market.”
The team participated in the Zahn program that spring to try to determine if there was a customer for this product. “That’s when we learned about the opportunity with construction sites,” he said. “We won the Zahn grand prize—$15K—and at that point we were all in to see if we could take this company forward.”
CarbonCLAIR was selected to participate in the NYC Innovation Hot Spot prototyping fund later in 2024. “We tried many things, many applications—we just kept pushing,” said Al-lahabi. “As undergraduates, we found that some opportunities for us were limited, but we started applying for grants and programs that were not just for students.”
Entrepreneurship is not new to Al-lahabi. “My father had a car repair business in Saudi Arabia,” he added. “When I was in high school, I used to go to my dad’s workshop for hours; I saw how he operated his business. Eventually I’d help as an assistant manager. I had to make a lot of real decisions. When I came to CUNY, I was able to pour that real life experience into running our startup and getting to the next steps—not just planning but operating.”
The CarbonCLAIR team secured a National Institutes of Health (NIH) P30 grant (meant to support collaborative research) of $35K, along with a Mount Sinai Innovation Hub grant of $10K. With Mount Sinai, the company is running a community-based air quality deployment in Jamaica, Queens. “We are focused on understanding short term pollution spikes that are often missed by daily average monitoring and evaluating possible mitigation strategies in real-world conditions,” he said.
CarbonCLAIR on Governors Island
In 2025, CarbonCLAIR was also selected to provide its technology as part of a climate solutions cohort run by The Trust for Governors Island. In that project, they are deploying dust mitigation and air filtration systems with Skanska on an active construction site to reduce particulate exposure and test scalable clean construction practices.
“It was a great opportunity, and we got selected in part because of the Mt. Sinai pilot and momentum that created,” said Al-lahar. “One thing kept leading to another. We created a specific prototype to showcase our technology, and we were the only undergraduate team to be chosen in that cohort.”
Al-lahabi and the team recognized that they would benefit from participating in I-Corps again. “We still had a lot of questions to resolve,” he said. “At that time, it was very difficult for an undergraduate to go to a National I-Corps—now it is basically impossible. They want participants to have a master’s at minimum; the rules have changed. I was the only undergraduate EL in my cohort, and we did well—our success ranking in that cohort was second place.”
The lessons from I-Corps were plentiful. “With regional, the biggest lesson was stop thinking like an engineer,” he said. “We want to make solutions, and sometimes we are trying to force a solution on a nonexistent problem. That’s not going to work. I-Corps taught us to look at the problem first—it trained us in how to do interviews and gave us a framework for thinking about a solution. Also, we were new to all the business and marketing terminology, and it was important to get that exposure.
“Our National I-Corps experience was life-changing,” Al-lahabi added. “We were trying to learn how to build a sustainable business. We went through all the processes with regional markets, but the deeper dive with national, the continuous check-ins with mentors, and the constant re-evaluation and revision of goals and value propositions was a very dynamic experience. National I-Corps helps you to think about things differently, whether it’s business, school, education—you realize how much you can simplify and streamline everything you need. Those lessons can translate into all areas of life. I’m not going to I-Corps because I developed a technology, but I’m trying to develop a technology that fits the market.”
CarbonCLAIR’s next big project is with the NYC Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). “An environmental tech lab within the city’s DEP has expressed a challenge they have that’s aligned with our target market,” said Al-lahabi. “We are aiming to have a proof of concept focused on developing and piloting a prototype system within municipal infrastructure facilities, with deployment by the end of 2026.”
Personally, Al-lahabi has another big step on the horizon. “I’ll graduate with a degree in civil engineering from Manhattan College this spring, and then I’m planning to continue my PhD in the same lab, Dr. Yang Liu’s Exam-Flow Lab.”
Al-lahabi also recognizes how early CarbonCLAIR is in its journey. “Much of what an undergraduate can develop is often not as sophisticated or novel; their knowledge may be more limited,” he added. “We are working with our Professor Dr. Yang Liu to further develop our technology.”