Nathan Roestandy: Building the Future of Environmental Health

Nathan Roestandy is the Founder and CEO of NAFAS, an environmental health company focused on improving the quality of the air people breathe.

Roestandy believes the next frontier of healthcare will begin not in hospitals, but in the environments where people spend most of their lives.

As wearable devices transformed the way people understand their own bodies, he believes the next wave of innovation will focus on something far less visible: the health of the buildings where people live and work.

"We were convinced from day one that through data, communication, and personalization, we could get people to care about the air they breathe," he says.

From Entrepreneurship to Environmental Health

After studying economics at the University of British Columbia in Canada, Roestandy founded his first company, Zulu, where he gained first-hand experience building hardware products and scaling a business.

The idea for NAFAS emerged during years of travelling to China, where severe air pollution had become a public health crisis. As demand for air purifiers and air quality technologies grew rapidly, he realized environmental health was becoming an entirely new category.

"I thought air pollution must become a major issue in other emerging markets as well," he says.

That idea eventually became NAFAS.

Building an Air Quality Ecosystem

Air quality is a more complex challenge than it first appears.

While most people associate pollution with the outdoors, Roestandy explains that much of our exposure actually happens indoors, as pollutants enter homes and office buildings through ventilation systems.

To address the problem, NAFAS built an integrated platform that monitors outdoor air quality, measures indoor environmental conditions through connected sensors, and improves air quality through filtration systems. All of these technologies are connected through a single software platform that translates environmental data into practical health insights.

Today, NAFAS works with governments, hospitals, multinational companies, commercial real estate developers, and large commercial buildings across the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

Why Clean Air Is the Next Frontier of Wellness

For decades, conversations around health have centered on exercise, nutrition, and sleep.

Roestandy believes another pillar has been quietly overlooked.

As wearable devices and personalized health tracking become increasingly common, people are learning more about their bodies than ever before. He believes the next step is understanding the environments where they spend most of their lives.

"When you look at health and wellness from a holistic perspective, you also have to consider the health of the environment you live in," he says.

According to Roestandy, indoor air quality affects respiratory and cardiovascular health, energy levels, and overall wellbeing. Yet one of the biggest misconceptions is that comfortable air is automatically healthy air. Fine particles and harmful gases remain invisible, quietly accumulating indoors over years of continuous exposure.

He compares poor air quality to an unhealthy diet. Just as poor nutrition gradually increases the risk of chronic disease, long-term exposure to polluted air quietly compounds health risks over time.

AI Is Turning Data Into Health Insights

NAFAS combines thousands of environmental sensors with artificial intelligence, collecting billions of data points from homes, offices, and commercial buildings.

For Roestandy, however, raw data has little value unless people can understand it.

Rather than presenting technical measurements, NAFAS translates environmental data into personalized health insights by combining information from air quality sensors, wearable devices, and scientific research.

"If I tell you you're breathing 10 micrograms per cubic meter of PM2.5, that doesn't mean much. But if I tell you your respiratory health score is 80 out of 100, people immediately understand it," he says.

The Rise of Healthy Buildings

The smart building industry has traditionally focused on automation, energy efficiency, and operational costs.

Roestandy believes the next step is making buildings healthier.

"I think what's missing is the health component," he says.

As sensors become smaller and AI more sophisticated, he expects healthy buildings to display real-time air quality information alongside other building data. That visibility gives occupants confidence that the environment around them is continuously monitored and meets recognized health standards.

Just as filtered drinking water has become an everyday expectation, Roestandy believes clean indoor air

will eventually become one too.

Building Beyond Emerging Markets

NAFAS was originally created with emerging markets in mind, where air pollution is often highly visible.

Today, Roestandy sees a much larger opportunity. He no longer sees environmental health as relevant only in heavily polluted cities.

Markets such as South Korea demonstrate that awareness, not pollution alone, drives demand. Although air quality is significantly better than in many developing countries, consumers actively invest in healthier indoor environments because health and wellness have become part of everyday life.

Roestandy compares the market to fitness.

"A nutrition program isn't only for people who are severely overweight. Many people simply want to improve their health," he says.

He expects environmental health to follow the same path. As awareness grows, demand will expand beyond heavily polluted regions into markets where consumers are increasingly focused on prevention and wellbeing.

That shift is already shaping NAFAS' international expansion, with plans extending beyond the Middle East into East Asia and Europe.

Success Starts with Awareness

For Roestandy, the ambition goes far beyond building another hardware company. He wants NAFAS to become a leader in the emerging field of environmental health.

"We were always told people don't care about air quality. But once you give them information that's easy to understand and personal to them, they do care," he says.

His vision is to make environmental health as familiar as fitness tracking or nutrition monitoring. Instead of thinking about air quality only during pollution events, people will routinely measure, understand, and improve the environments where they live and work.