Rawand Rasheed
CO-FOUNDER AND CEO AT HELIX EARTH
WHEN RAWAND RASHEED DECIDED TO LEAVE his job at NASA, he knew the agency would be fine without him. But the company he envisioned—Helix Earth—wouldn’t exist unless he took the leap.
“Whether I stayed or left, NASA would be fine,” he said. “But I knew that if I didn’t push this, nobody else would.” Helix Earth’s namesake technology, a helical filter Rasheed helped invent for droplet capture in space, was about to get adapted for Earth.
“One of the main things that really differentiates this company is our filtration system. It’s our droplet capture process,” Rasheed explained.
The filter consists of a rigid, porous material embedded with helical channels “like a rigid sponge” that spin droplets out of airflow and absorb them, much like water soaking into a paper towel. Originally developed for NASA’s Orion spacecraft, the system now forms the backbone of a commercial platform with wide potential, from HVAC to carbon dioxide and pollutant capture.
“Fail as much as you can. Fail fast. Don’t be ashamed of it. Pursue new things as much as possible. Step outside of your comfort zone and just don’t be afraid to look silly.”
—Rawand Rasheed
SHIFTING FOCUS
Helix Earth recently shifted its business focus to what customers really want: “Most of the industry cares about saving money up front,” Rasheed said. That shift led the company to concentrate on ventilation—one of the fastest-growing, most expensive, and energy-intensive segments in HVAC, according to Rasheed—with the aim to reduce cost and long-term energy using its filtration technology originally designed for space.
Still, founding a startup wasn’t easy. “Getting that first fundraise locked down” was Rasheed’s biggest challenge. And as a technical CEO, he had to quickly level up in public speaking, business case development, and investor relations. “If you come from a scientific or engineering background, you don’t really get much training on [that]. You have to learn a lot in a very short time. You have to adapt quickly,” he said.
Born in Iraq and raised in the U.S., Rasheed is the son of a civil engineer who was the first in his Kurdish family to graduate from high school and university. Ironically, Rasheed resisted following that path—until a college physics class won him over. “I ended up loving it so much that I was like, how can I do more of that? I switched to mechanical engineering and never looked back,” he said.
Reflecting on the future, Rasheed believes the biggest opportunities may lie not in brand-new inventions, but in overlooked ones. “There are so many good technologies out there invented that just need to be sort of optimized and implemented,” he said. With Helix Earth, he’s proving just how far that approach can go.
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