Karan Verma
Karan is a high school student in Frisco, Texas, and one half of the pair who started Naturista out of a school project about household waste. He plays football and follows the NFL closely, cooks whenever he gets the chance, and volunteers at a local chef academy. He will happily admit to watching more Shark Tank than is strictly reasonable.
Outside Naturista he competes in DECA and BPA, and he co-founded Invest2Empower, a student run effort that teaches financial literacy to Ukrainians during wartime, now running in several US states and internationally via multiple chapters. He has also served on a congressional youth advisory council, which mostly taught him how slowly good ideas move and how much that matters.
Aditya Herekar
Aditya is a high school student in Edison, New Jersey, and the other half of the pair behind Naturista. He plays basketball and piano, is learning guitar, and still makes time for Rick Riordan. He is also an opinion writer and editor for his school newspaper JPS Hawkeye.
Outside Naturista, he is an activist for Ukraine and co-founded Invest2Empower, teaching financial literacy to Ukrainians through a partnership with ENGin, where he also volunteers as an English tutor. That work took him to a TEDx stage, where he shared his experiences teaching Ukrainian students to bring their stories and the challenges they face to a wider audience. He is also a passionate advocate for sustainability, an interest that led him into materials science and sustainable food packaging research and eventually to the coffee pod he and Karan are trying to bring into the world. A treasurer in the student council, he competes in DECA and volunteers at a veterans memorial home.
How it started
A school project in Chemistry class about household waste put a simple question in front of both of us: what actually happens to a coffee pod after it is used. The answer was a laminate of plastic and aluminium that no household system can process, inside a market producing more than eighty billion of them a year. We were drinking from them every morning, in two households a thousand miles apart.
The work spanned two kitchens in two different states. Biopolymers ordered online, moulds improvised, films cast, brewed, and photographed as they failed. Two hundred prototypes in, a pullulan formulation held its shape through a full extraction and then dissolved on command. Neither of us had a lab, which turned out to matter less than we expected.
When we realized we needed professional expertise, we turned to university professors who helped us with their expertise in materials and food science, shelf life extension, and commercialization that helped us take Naturista from a passion project to a real-life startup.
Get in touch
For interviews, licensing enquiries or research questions, email us directly.