In a conversation with Manifest, Mairu Gupta, founder and CEO, Antkind Collective, reveals why climate change and deeptech need storytelling that builds trust, clarity and long-term adoption.

How was Antkind created? What sparked the agency? 

The idea for Antkind Collective began with a very personal reality. My parents, who have lived in Delhi for decades, were suffering the direct health consequences of a changing climate – choking air pollution, extreme heatwaves. I realized that while the problems of climate change were becoming deeply personal for millions, the stories of the innovators building solutions felt distant, technical, and were failing to connect.

That raised a bigger question, how do we make climate pop; how does it become part of everyday conversation without being reduced to trends or slogans? Most agencies chase the mass consumer and optimize for trends and short-term metrics. But the frontier economy, i.e. climate change, energy systems, advanced materials, doesn’t move that way. It needs complex information to travel as narratives across rooms, from customers to investors, partners to policymakers.

Antkind emerged from that realization. India’s next decade will be defined by climate change, sustainability and deeptech. I started the collective to bring strategic, culturally-aware storytelling to the sectors that urgently need it, so the solutions for a better future are not just seen, but understood and adopted.

What problem is Antkind fundamentally trying to solve? 

Climate and deeptech innovation is mostly B2B, highly technical, and systemic. Yet the marketing industry is overwhelmingly geared toward B2C storytelling. Too often, brands fall into the same traps; trend chasing, Instagram first mechanics, slang heavy campaigns that don’t serve their deeper purpose.

That creates a real gap. Who is thinking about how industrial innovation earns trust? How does renewable infrastructure build adoption? How does carbon and material science become understandable to the people and institutions that matter?

Stories either get buried in jargon or flattened into CSR style messaging. That makes it hard for innovation to earn trust, attract capital, or gain long term relevance. Antkind exists to address this disconnect. We help organisations convert complexity into clarity, and intent into adoption. In transition sectors, belief is built carefully and at scale.

In late  2025, we launched Antkind Labs, a product studio developing strategic intelligence tools that make sophisticated marketing accessible and actionable. For us, this is about solving the structural gaps that keep good companies from breaking through. We’re building the tools, partnerships, and intellectual property that the frontier economy needs to move faster.

How would you describe Antkind to someone outside the agency world? 

We’re a marketing and growth consultancy built for companies building the future. We take complex, world-changing ideas, from climate tech to materials science, and make them understandable, credible, and adoptable.

We build storytelling systems; brand, content, thought leadership, go to market narratives that compound over time. It’s not about being loud. It’s about being right, at the tables that matter.

Many agencies now claim to be purpose-led. What truly differentiates Antkind? 

For many, purpose is positioning. For us, purpose is a constraint. We don’t work across everything. We focus on climate, sustainability, deeptech and future facing infrastructure; sectors where the business, the mission, and the impact are deeply interwoven. That depth lets us go beyond surface level storytelling into real strategic partnership. 

We have deep experience in B2B ecosystems, where success is driven by credibility and long-term relevance, rather than virality or volume. That changes how one approaches brand building, narrative design, and growth systems. We spend as much time on why a story matters as we do on how it’s told.

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How does Antkind operate, what makes your team unique and how is it structured to handle diverse clients and complex projects globally?

Our structure: A distributed collective

Antkind is a lean and highly distributed collective. By 2025, we were operating across 17 locations, from metros to tier-2 cities, with global anchors in Berlin and Tokyo. We run fully remote; no relocation, no commuting, Slack as HQ; and yet we maintain 98% on-time delivery across projects.

Our reach: Global impact from day one

Our work spans 30+ clients across eight time zones, from basement startups to ~USD 2 billion organisations, backed by MIT, Y Combinator, and climate-first VCs. Our projects cut across industries including sustainable space-tech, AI, agriculture, materials, climate finance, EVs, packaging, ESG, plant protein, and climate infrastructure. 

Our process: High-context and human

Every engagement starts with senior involvement, with ownership retained by the same two-three people from brief to delivery. We favour high-context async communication over endless standups, and feedback stays direct and actionable. 

A few cultural signals stand out: women make up ~72% of our hires without quotas, and our recurring rituals like ‘Thirsty Thursdays’ bring the team together weekly, blending drinks, trivia, and personal journeys. Even with a lean structure, we have delivered campaigns reaching 75 million plus people and launched brands that didn’t exist a year ago. 

Our DNA: Curiosity first

Ultimately, curiosity is the signal that shapes our team, our process, and the outcomes we’re proud of. It shows up early, often before we’ve even explained the work, and it’s what allows us to go deep with our partners.

You often talk about ‘turning intent into adoption’. What does that mean in practice? 

Good intent and strong technology don’t automatically translate into adoption. Adoption requires belief; from customers, investors, partners, and sometimes policymakers.

Our role is to design narrative engines that make complexity workable. That might mean refining a founder’s story, structuring a thought leadership platform, or building identity systems that quietly travel through supply chains.

We measure success not by visibility alone, but by movement and uptake; i.e. shorter sales cycles, clearer investment conversations, stronger inbound, better alignment. That’s how you know a story isn’t just heard, it’s adopted.

Can you share an example that captures Antkind’s approach?

Our work with altM is emblematic of how we think. altM is a biomaterials company creating high performance, bio derived materials for a post petrochemical world. The challenge wasn’t the technology, rather it was translation. How do you make a ‘lignin company’ feel intelligible, investment-grade and partner ready in a single scroll?

We treated the brand as a system, not a slogan. Instead of leading with sustainability as a headline, we focused on clarity and coherence. The identity and website were designed to feel scientifically rigorous yet human + yet enterprise-ready in enterprise conversations but easy to grasp.

One of the most distinct outcomes was the ‘Created with altM” badge. It isn’t a campaign. It’s a trust mechanism; meant to live on products over time, building recognition through repetition rather than promotion.

Alongside that, we built the full ecosystem: brand identity, positioning, website, messaging architecture, sales enablement assets, social assets, product demo kits, the science facility itself and a long-term communications strategy. That’s how we approach climate and deeptech storytelling, restrained, all pervasive and built to last.

What kinds of founders and companies does Antkind work best with?

We work best with founders solving real, structural problems who see brand as a long-term asset. We’re drawn to ambitious, coachable teams that value speed, clarity, and momentum and understand the cost of getting it wrong. 

Where there’s an opportunity to sharpen narrative, accelerate go-to-market, and build trust across markets and institutions, Antkind delivers outsized impact for both startups and corporations. Done well, our work unlocks exponential growth and capital efficiency and creates flywheels that make a business increasingly difficult to displace.

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How do you see Antkind evolving over the next few years?

Our ambition isn’t scale for its own sake, it’s depth and impact. We want to build sharper sector expertise, stronger intellectual property and original thinking that travels from India into the global climate conversation. 

As agencies become more specialised, Antkind is focused on building a climate and deeptech playbook that is culturally intelligent, strategically rigorous, and designed for the long haul. 

This special feature appeared in the February issue of Manifest. Get your copy here.