Orianna Bretschger

Orianna Bretschger did not take the usual road into water. Her degree was in physics and astronomy, and that is what first took her into aerospace, where she worked on the guidance systems behind missiles and on the first generation of the CCD camera sensors that now sit in everyone's phone. What stayed with her from all of that was a fascination with electrons, with how you move them and control them, and when she went back to do a PhD she pointed that same curiosity at biology, studying how certain bacteria pass electrons to each other and to their surroundings. That electron transfer turns out to be how those bacteria breathe, and the faster you let them move electrons, the faster they eat, which is the whole trick that became Aquacycl.

Orianna Bretschger built Aquacycl around the microbial fuel cell, or MFC, which is an old idea (the first paper on bacteria making electricity was published in the UK back in 1911) that only became practical once we understood the biology well enough to control it. The bacteria do the cleaning for free, because nature already built them, so as she puts it the company cannot take credit for the biology. Aquacycl's contribution is the engineering around it: a cheap, modular black box you can stack together like Legos to build up real treatment capacity right at an industrial site. That modularity is also why the technology is aimed at concentrated industrial waste rather than dilute municipal sewage, because the dirtier and more loaded the water, the more energy the bacteria have to work with.

Orianna Bretschger sells all of this not as a machine but as a service, which is the part an investor should pay attention to. Aquacycl treats wastewater on-site for industrial food and beverage customers, the breweries, distilleries and bottlers whose waste is too strong and too lumpy for the city sewer, and instead of a capital project it charges them a recurring fee tied to volume, with a performance guarantee to stay inside their discharge permit. The pitch is simple and audited by the customer's own bill: it saves them 20 to 60% against what they currently pay to discharge to the sewer or to truck the waste away. Because the systems are not buried infrastructure, Aquacycl can add a container when a plant grows or pull one out when it shrinks, which gives it multi-year, recurring revenue rather than one-off project income.

Orianna Bretschger is, in her own words, a "recovering academic," still learning to speak the language of business after a career spent in the lab and the not-for-profit research world, and she is unusually candid about what that transition costs. She is also pointed about who gets to build companies in the first place: Aquacycl has three co-founders, two of them women and two of them immigrants, and she will remind you that only about 2% of venture capital goes to female-founded companies even though women and men start companies at roughly equal rates. Her own goal for Aquacycl is refreshingly unglamorous, which is to get the business profitable first, drive the cost of the hardware down, and earn its way into the larger water market on the strength of happy customers rather than hype.

“The biology is super cool. Nature did that, right? We can't take any credit for that. Our special sauce is in that control mechanism.”

That instinct, to give the credit to the bacteria and keep the credit for the engineering, is most of why Aquacycl reads as a real business and not a science project.