UNESCO calls water pollution one of the main challenges facing societies, with 2 million tonnes of sewage entering the world’s water each day. Oxyle wants to help solve the crisis with a new wastewater treatment that removes micropollutants. The Zurich-based startup announced today $3 million in pre-seed funding that it will use to bring its tech to market. The round was led by Wingman Ventures with participation from SOSV, Better Ventures and another.vc.
The new capital brings Oxyle’s total raised so far to $7.4 million since it was founded in 2020. The startup’s customers include companies in the pesticide, chemical, textile pigments, electronics and pharmaceutical sectors that are regulated by strict discharge limits.
Oxyle’s wastewater treatment was developed five years ago by co-founder and CEO Dr. Fajer Mushtaq during her doctoral research at ETH Zurich. While earning her masters, Dr. Mushtaq worked with synthetic chemicals to develop new nanomaterials for biomedical applications. That resulted in wastewater containing toxic chemicals that needed special handling and disposal methods. Because there wasn’t an effective way to remove the chemicals, the wastewater had to be incinerated.
“For me, this way of handling water was not only costly, unsafe and very unsustainable, but it also completely got rid of one of our most precious resources,” Dr. Mushtaq said. “The more I researched this topic, the more I learned about the immense scale at which incineration was practiced by small and large international companies.”
