Get to know Dr. Fajer Mushtaq, CEO & Co-Founder
Growing up in Delhi, every time Fajer turned the faucet, she faced a familiar anxiety: Was the water clean? Would there be enough? From a young age, she vowed to make water her life’s mission.
During her Masters at ETH Zurich, she saw the other side of the water crisis. In Switzerland, clean water seemed to flow endlessly from the taps, yet micropollutants were silently contaminating water supplies. The problem wasn’t just the pollution, it was also how we handled it.
In the lab, she saw firsthand how toxic wastewater wasn’t treated—it was incinerated. An expensive process that only sent pollutants right back into the environment.
Determined to change this, she focused her doctoral research over 5 years on developing a nanocatalyst that could break down and mineralize micropollutants using just vibrations in water—no toxic waste, no secondary pollution, no high-energy costs.
She knew, to make a real difference, she needed to graduate this idea out of the lab and into the real world. With the support of her co-founder Silvan, they launched Oxyle in 2020 to eliminate Forever Chemicals – down to the last drop.
Get to know Dr. Silvan Staufert, CTO & Co-founder
Silvan has always been drawn to solving big, complex challenges. That drive led him to ETH Zurich, where he earned a Master’s in Mechanical and Process Engineering and a PhD in Micro- and Nanotechnology, specializing in advanced materials and sensors.
He started his career in R&D at IST AG working on novel sensors systems. Though one question kept pulling him back—where could his engineering expertise make the biggest impact? Water, the world’s most vital resource, was an industry fundamentally lacking innovation. It was an opportunity too important to ignore.
During his PhD, he met Fajer Mushtaq, and they recognized a critical gap—water treatment alone wasn’t enough. Without real-time monitoring, there was no way to know what was being discharged or if treatment was actually working.
In 2020, he co-founded Oxyle, combining Fajer’s advanced catalyst with his novel sensor system to eliminate Forever Chemicals—and prove that it works in real time.