Miki Agrawal

This woman built a diaper that eats itself.

In 2001, Miki was two weeks into her job at Deutsche Bank.

Her office was across from the World Trade Center.

She overslept that morning, on 9/11, and never made it in.

After that, she made a list of the 3 things she actually wanted to do with her life:
- Play professional soccer
- Make films
- Start a business
She did all three.

She played for the New York Magic until two torn ACLs ended her career.

She worked on film sets and music videos.

And in 2005, she launched WILD, a gluten-free, farm-to-table pizza restaurant in NYC. Funded by $250,000 she raised by hosting dinner parties.

But it was a period, literally, that led to her breakout.

At a family reunion, Miki and her twin sister Radha were doing a three-legged race when Radha got her period.

As they rushed to the bathroom, they started talking: what if underwear could absorb everything?

What if women didn’t need tampons or pads?

That moment sparked THINX, the now-iconic period underwear company that helped kick off a feminist hygiene revolution.

Their subway ads, featuring grapefruit halves and dripping egg yolks, were nearly banned by the MTA, but public backlash helped the brand go viral.

THINX was soon featured in Time’s 25 Best Inventions and Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies.

Then she launched TUSHY.

A sleek, affordable bidet attachment designed to replace toilet paper and modernize American bathrooms.

The mission wasn’t just comfort.

It was climate: Americans flush 15 million trees a year down the toilet.

With TUSHY, users saved paper, money, and forests.

The brand raised $500,000 from investors like the Casper founders and reached virality with its irreverent tone and convention: Butt-Con.

Then came the mushrooms.

In 2019, during one of her weekly “Thinking Fridays,” Miki was sitting by a window holding her son, Hiro.

She’d changed thousands of diapers by then and was overwhelmed by the environmental cost.

Diapers take up to 400 years to break down, and each baby uses about 6,000 of them.

She had a wild thought: “If breast milk is liquid gold, then baby poop must be fertilizer gold.”

At that moment, Hiro pointed to a book on her nightstand: Pacha’s Pajamas.

She kept reading after he lost interest.

On page 31, she read that certain types of fungi can eat plastic.

So she partnered with Four Sigmatic founder Tero Isokauppila and together, they developed a plastic-decomposing fungi formula that could be added to diapers.

The fungi would activate in landfills and begin breaking down the waste.

In 2025, they launched HIRO Technologies, named after her son.

Their first product is a fully functional diaper + fungi system that begins decomposing within two months.

In landfills, it could break down in under a year.

But Miki’s vision goes far beyond diapers.

HIRO aims to license its fungi tech to break down all soft plastics: trash bags, pee pads, even dental floss.