In a workshop north of downtown Phoenix, a small team is running water through a flow-through electrochemical cell. They are trying to break carbon-fluorine bonds, the strongest single bonds in organic chemistry.
The water comes in laced with PFAS, the family of synthetic chemicals now found in firefighting foam, nonstick coatings, and a growing share of American drinking water. The water is supposed to come out with the fluorine mineralized into safe end-products. Nothing nasty is left behind to truck off to a landfill.
That, in one sentence, is the bet OXbyEL Technologies is making.
Founded in 2018 by Ed Ricci and Dr. Colleen Legzdins, OXbyEL sells an integrated water treatment system that pairs membrane pre-concentration with a proprietary electrolyzer the company calls TOF [OXbyEL Technology Page]. The pitch to industrial customers is that the unit destroys PFAS and co-pollutants in a single step, with no secondary waste and no costly chemical inputs [OXbyEL Advantages Page].
The US EPA, which has been cataloguing PFAS treatment candidates through its SBIR program, describes OXbyEL's method as a low-cost, continuous flow-through approach that mineralizes PFAS in minutes [US EPA]. That is a meaningful claim in a category where the dominant incumbent answer, granular activated carbon, does not destroy the molecule at all. It catches PFAS, then the spent carbon becomes someone else's problem.
The bet
The two co-founders met as consultants working on wastewater performance at an oil and gas refinery. The company they built reflects that origin: industrial water, not municipal [OXbyEL About].
Ricci is President and CEO with what the company describes as 35 years in environmental services, including groundwater contamination, Superfund and RCRA work, and regulatory permitting [F6S] [Water Innovation Nation, 2024]. Legzdins is VP of Technology [CONNECTpreneur, Sep 2022].
The headcount stood at five as of late 2022 [CONNECTpreneur, Sep 2022]. The company has at least one patent pending, application 16/458,608 [CONNECTpreneur, Sep 2022].
The wedge is zero liquid discharge for industrial sites that would otherwise have to ship PFAS-laden concentrate off to incineration or deep-well injection. Membranes shrink the volume. The electrolyzer destroys what is left.
If the unit economics work at field scale, the customer avoids both the carbon-swap treadmill and the hazardous waste manifest.
Why it could be big
The regulatory wind is at the company's back. The US EPA finalized national drinking water limits for six PFAS compounds in 2024, with enforceable maximums for PFOA and PFOS in the single digits of parts per trillion.
Utilities and industrial dischargers across North America are now sizing capital programs against numbers that did not exist three years ago. OXbyEL's NSF SBIR Phase II award, #174733, is specifically scoped to validate performance at 70 parts per trillion combined PFAS concentration and to model capital and operating costs for a full-scale system [SBIR.gov].
That is the right test for the right moment. The National Science Foundation has put $250,000 of grant capital into the company, disclosed in December 2022 [CB Insights, Dec 2022].
A back of envelope on the prize: roughly 66,000 public water systems serve the United States, and EPA has estimated several thousand will need PFAS treatment under the new rule. If even 2,000 industrial and municipal sites eventually install destructive treatment at an average system price of $2 million (estimated), that is a $4 billion equipment opportunity, before service and consumables.
Capture a low single-digit share and you have a real company. Miss the cost target and you are a science project.
NSF Grant 2022 | 0.25 | $M
SBIR Phase II target concentration | 70 | ppt PFAS
Headcount 2022 | 5 | people
Years since founding | 7 | years
The team and traction
Ricci's background in regulatory permitting matters more than it sounds. PFAS treatment is a permitted activity. The buyer at an industrial site is usually an environmental compliance manager who has been burned before by vendors that could not get a discharge permit through the state.
Legzdins runs the technology side and is the named technical lead on the company's public materials [Crunchbase]. Five people is a small team. PFAS destruction is a small-team problem at this stage: the work is reactor design, electrode chemistry, and field validation, not enterprise sales.
The honest counterfactual
What the bears will say is that destructive PFAS treatment is a crowded research field. Supercritical water oxidation companies like 374Water and plasma-based approaches from Aquagga and others are chasing the same regulatory wave. Several have raised meaningfully more capital than OXbyEL's disclosed $250,000 grant [CB Insights, Dec 2022].
Electrochemical mineralization also has a known cost vulnerability: energy consumption per gram of fluoride liberated. If the kilowatt-hours per cubic meter come in high, the operating cost story falls apart against a simple carbon-and-haul incumbent.
The bull answer is that the SBIR Phase II scope is exactly the work that resolves this question. Pre-concentrating with membranes before the electrolyzer is the standard way to get the energy math to close.
EPA's public description of the method as low-cost and continuous flow-through suggests the agency's reviewers found the early data credible enough to fund the next step [US EPA].
What to watch
The milestone that matters in the next twelve months is the Phase II validation report: a third-party number on dollars per thousand gallons treated at the 70 ppt target, and a full-scale capital cost estimate the company can put in front of an industrial buyer.
A first paying pilot at a named refinery, airport, or chrome plater would do more for OXbyEL's fundraising than any pitch deck. A priced Series A would not be a surprise if those numbers land where the SBIR proposal suggests they will.
The incumbent OXbyEL has to beat is Calgon Carbon, the granular activated carbon standard that has owned PFAS removal for two decades. Calgon catches the molecule. OXbyEL wants to end it.
That is a different product, and if the joules per gram of fluoride come in cheap enough, it is a better one.
Watts Lindqvist covers climate and energy for Startuply.