Jonathan Rhone

Jonathan Rhone did not come to water through water. He came through energy, and he says so himself, calling himself a serial entrepreneur in cleantech who happened to land in wastewater. Before Axine he founded and ran Nexterra Systems, a biomass gasification company, and he started his career in the oil patch at Amoco and Dome Petroleum in Calgary. So when a couple of cleantech venture capitalists asked him to help look over their deal flow around 2013, he was a generalist with an energy background, not a water man. Then he met Axine’s technical founder, a materials engineer who had left a fuel cell company with a garage full of prototypes and an idea: take the electrochemistry that powers fuel cells and point it at the worst wastewater instead. In his words, I knew nothing about water or wastewater at the time, and he partnered with her anyway.

Jonathan Rhone built Axine around a single stubborn problem. Almost everything we manufacture now, from drugs to semiconductors to cars, throws off synthetic chemicals that do not biodegrade, and most factories deal with them by trucking the contaminated water off-site to be incinerated. Rhone thought that was a terrible idea, so Axine’s reactors do something harder: they destroy the molecules instead of moving them. The system applies electricity to catalyst-coated electrodes to generate hydroxyl radicals (a hydroxyl radical is one of the most reactive oxidants you can make, one oxygen and one hydrogen), and those radicals tear the pollutant molecules apart down to benign gases, hydrogen, oxygen, CO2. There is no sludge and no brine left over, which is the whole point, and on the worst contaminants, PFAS included, the process reaches parts-per-trillion levels.

Jonathan Rhone is just as proud of the business model as the chemistry, and that is the part newcomers usually miss. Axine does not sell the box. It sells the result, financing, building, operating and remotely monitoring the system on-site under a multi-year contract, with a written performance guarantee on the treated water. The reason is psychological as much as technical: industrial customers in wastewater are deeply risk-averse, so Rhone’s pitch was to absorb the technology risk himself and hand the customer a clean outcome. He is candid that getting there was brutal, admitting the early technology worked for 30 hours, then 300, when they needed 60,000, and that the field is unforgiving: wastewater requires patience. His bar was that the technology had to be ten times better than incineration or chemical oxidation to be worth a customer’s switching risk.

Jonathan Rhone has one big opinion that explains everything else he does, and it comes from his energy years. He thinks water is simply too cheap. He points out that when he started in energy there was no price on carbon, and that putting one on it reshaped the whole market, and he wants the same correction for water so that the value of cleaning it up actually shows up on a balance sheet. It is the through-line from Axine to where he is now. Rhone left Axine in 2022 (the company later took a fifteen-million-dollar strategic investment from Veralto in 2024 to keep scaling), and he co-founded CO280, a Vancouver company that retrofits pulp-and-paper mills to capture and permanently store their biogenic CO2. CO280 has since signed large carbon-removal deals with Microsoft and JPMorganChase and ranks among the world’s top engineered carbon-removal suppliers, which is the same playbook he ran in water: find an enormous unpriced externality, and build the business that finally makes someone pay to fix it.

“When we started Axine, I would have said that innovation in water was 10 or 15 years behind the energy sector. I still think there is an enormous opportunity for the application of data in water. We are just getting started.”

That is the Jonathan Rhone pattern in one line: an energy guy who keeps walking into the markets where the damage is real but nobody has put a price on it yet, and building the company that does.