Forbes: How Oxyle plans to rid the world’s waters of forever pollutants.

In this article

David Prosser covers Oxyle’s story and latest funding round in Forbes.

Fajer Mushtaq has been worrying about water for as long as she can remember. The co-founder of cleantech start-up Oxyle, which is today announcing a CHF2.8 million ($3 million) pre-seed funding round, Mushtaq is originally from the Kashmir region of India, but conflict forced her family to relocate to Delhi. “We went from living somewhere full of lakes and rivers to a city where there was almost no water in the summer.”

Mushtaq’s parents were both doctors; while she chose a different career, she knew she would also want to do something of social value. And working on her doctoral thesis at ETH Zurich, she spotted her opportunity to contribute – she and her co-founder at Oxyle, Silvan Staufert, developed a new technology for cleaning water contaminated with micro-pollutants – the “forever” chemicals that are so difficult to get rid of.

It is one of the world’s most pressing problems. Water all over the world is contaminated with tiny molecules from pesticides, pharmaceutical products and other sources of toxicity. Industries such as the chemicals and agriculture sector are creating more of this waste in the water that they use during manufacturing processes. But tackling the issue is really difficult.

That’s where Zurich-based Oxyle comes in. Mushtaq and Staufert have developed a new material that destroys micropollutants, breaking them down into completely harmless molecules through a process of oxidisation. Unlike other processes designed to clean water contaminated in this way, which rely on absorption, filtration or even simply burning the water, there is no end waste product to worry about.

Read more.

Get in Touch!

Let’s eliminate PFAS from your wastewater. Fill out the contact form and we’ll be in touch soon.

Dr. Silvan Staufert & Dr. Fajer Mushtaq

Growing up in Delhi, every time Fajer turned the faucet, she faced a familiar anxiety: Was it clean? Would there be enough? From a young age, she vowed to make water her life’s mission.

While pursuing a doctorate at ETH Zurich, Fajer met Silvan, another idealist who understood that when it comes to water treatment, innovations can’t come soon enough and he knew that his broad engineering skills would find a great use in this mission.

Together, they saw their chance to make a real impact by addressing one of humanity’s greatest challenges: Forever Chemicals.

Realizing the lack of effective solutions, they created a technology that could degrade and mineralize Forever Chemicals in minutes. They knew this innovation could change the world, but only if it graduated out of the lab and into the real world.

In 2020, Oxyle was born with a singular mission: to restore and protect our waters from Forever Chemicals, down to the very last drop.