Fajer Mushtaq

Fajer Mushtaq did not arrive in water the obvious way. She started in electrical engineering at Aston University in the UK, spent a year in industry, and then moved to ETH Zürich in Switzerland for a master’s and a PhD in micro- and nanotechnology, which is the science of building materials and machines at a scale far too small to see. Her doctorate was about using those tiny-engineered materials to clean water, and one of them turned out to do something unusual: when you activated it mechanically, by shaking or vibrating it, it generated the kind of reactive chemistry that tears pollutants apart. That was the spark of Oxyle.

Here is why that matters. PFAS, the “forever chemicals” you have heard about in non-stick pans, firefighting foam and a worrying amount of drinking water, are built around carbon-fluorine bonds, which are close to the most stubborn bond in all of chemistry. That stubbornness is the whole problem, and it is why most water treatment today does not actually get rid of PFAS. It just moves them, filtering the chemicals out of the water and onto a spent filter or into a concentrated brine that somebody still has to truck away and store. Oxyle’s pitch, in Fajer’s words, is to break the bond instead of just relocating it, down to parts-per-trillion levels, without leaving a toxic sludge behind.

And the clever part is where the energy comes from. Destroying a molecule that tough normally takes a lot of power, so the usual knock on “destruction” technologies is that they are too expensive to run. Oxyle’s reactors harvest the mechanical energy that is already there in any water system, the flow, the turbulence, the bubbling and vibration of water moving through pipes, and use it to drive the catalyst. The pollutant pays for its own destruction, more or less, which is what keeps the operating cost in a range an industrial customer will actually sign up for.

Regulators are now forcing the question. In April 2024 the US EPA set its first national drinking-water limit for two of these compounds at 4 parts per trillion, and that number is genuinely hard to picture, so here is the scale of it: four parts per trillion is roughly four drops spread across a thousand Olympic swimming pools. When the legal limit is four drops in a thousand pools, “capture it and store it somewhere” starts to look like deferring the bill rather than paying it, and that is the shift Oxyle is built for.

The market has been coming round to that view. Oxyle has raised $19 million so far, a $3 million seed in 2022 and a $16 million Series A in early 2025 led by 360 Capital, which for a hardware company in the business of destroying molecules is real conviction rather than a cheap option on a trend. And my favourite detail of how the first money actually showed up tells you something about how Fajer operates, because the lead investor on the pre-seed never got a pitch:

“When we got the term sheet from our lead investor for the pre-seed, we were not fundraising. They just came for coffee. We were known to have good coffee in the market. And the next day, we got the term sheet.”

She is, in short, a scientist who can sell: the rare deep-tech founder who can hold the chemistry and the cap table in the same conversation, which is most of why Oxyle has moved as fast as it has.