Julie Bliss Mullen

Julie Bliss Mullen did not set out to destroy forever chemicals. She came up through the drinking-water industry and the US EPA, then went to the University of Massachusetts Amherst on a National Science Foundation fellowship for a PhD in environmental engineering, where electrochemistry, the science of using electricity to drive chemical reactions, started as a side project on the bench. When she wrote her first grant to fund a company on PFAS destruction, somebody told her it could not be done, that breaking the carbon-fluorine bond at the heart of PFAS, the strongest bond in nature, would win her a Nobel Prize. She filed the patent anyway, and in 2020 spun the work out of UMass as Aclarity.

Julie Bliss Mullen built Aclarity around electrochemical oxidation, which is a fancy way of saying you put an anode and a cathode in the water, run electricity through them, and generate oxidants that tear pollutants apart. PFAS, the "forever chemicals" you have heard about in non-stick pans, firefighting foam and a worrying amount of drinking water, stick to the reactor's anode surface and get mineralized on the spot. The point most water treatment misses is that activated carbon and ion exchange only move PFAS, filtering them out of the water and onto a spent medium or into a brine that somebody still has to truck away. Aclarity's reactors leave no filter, no brine and no transferred waste, which is what puts them in the destruction camp of water technology rather than the capture camp.

Julie Bliss Mullen made the smart call to attack PFAS where it piles up. Almost half of all the PFAS ever manufactured ends up in landfills, and the contaminated rainwater that drains out of them, the leachate, has become expensive and risky to ship to a wastewater plant. Aclarity went after that landfill leachate stream and showed, as she explained on the show in how Aclarity bootstrapped its journey to PFAS destruction, that it could take raw leachate at parts-per-billion levels of PFAS down to non-detect in a single pass through a reactor. And she got there scrappily, on a $26,000 pitch-challenge prize that funded the first prototype, managing money so tightly that she did not pay herself for years.

Julie Bliss Mullen turned that grit into real conviction from investors. Aclarity raised about $20 million across three rounds, a seed led by Burnt Island Ventures in 2022 and a $15.9 million Series A led by Aqualateral in 2023, and won Frost and Sullivan's 2023 PFAS Company of the Year along the way, with Forbes naming her to its 30 Under 30 in Science back in 2019. She led Aclarity for roughly eight years before handing off the CEO seat in 2025; today she advises the company, mentors deep-tech founders, and is building PFAS Group, a community aimed at cutting how much PFAS stays in circulation.

“I wrote my first grant to fund the company on PFAS destruction, and somebody said, if you're actually breaking the carbon-fluorine bond, that can't happen. You would win a Nobel Prize.”

Julie Bliss Mullen is, in short, the scientist who took the "impossible" framing as a starting line, and the founder who proved a scrappy team could out-execute far better-funded rivals on the one bond chemistry said you could not break.