Fajer Mushtaq: "Every day in the start-up world is an adventure."

When you were a kid, what did you want to be?

I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to be when growing up, but I was in a unique position: I come from a family of medical doctors. At every family gathering, this was what everyone was talking about. So, all the kids in my family knew from a young age what it means to work long hours and to devote your attention and resources to your work. I could see that my parents’ profession brought them great satisfaction and immense joy. Although we have a long history of medical practice in our family, my heart laid elsewhere.

Rather than focusing on what profession I wanted to engage in, I followed a broad concept: like my parents, I wanted to bring about positive change in our society, to create something of my own and not necessarily have a nine-to-five job. I wanted to be happy and proud of my work. At school, biology was not my favourite subject, but I loved learning new concepts in chemistry, physics and mathematics. Therefore, for my undergraduate degree I decided to pursue engineering. Breaking with family tradition was not easy but now I have the title of "doctor" too.

You completed your bachelor’s degree in Birmingham, moved to Zurich for your master’s and then worked on your doctorate at ETH. Why all these moves?

I was in the United Kingdom for around four years. During my three-year bachelor’s course, I took a gap year to work in industry. After this work experience, I decided to continue my education. As I started looking around for a reputable university, I found ETH. ETH offers engineers one of the best forms of education anywhere in the world. Once I was accepted on the Micro- and Nanosystem Master’s programme at ETH, I decided to move to Zurich. This decision was motivated by ETH’s global ranking and because I wanted a new challenge. After my positive experience studying at ETH, I decided to stay on and pursue my doctoral research here as well.

After your doctorate, you founded Oxyle. What is the idea behind it?

For my PhD, I was hired to develop new materials for biomedical applications. Two or three months into it, I found that every time I worked with chemicals in the laboratory and generated wastewater, I had to follow a very specific protocol for safely handling this contaminated wastewater. For example, wastewater contaminated with chemicals, solvents, heavy metals etc. cannot be discharged down the sink, instead we are required to take such polluted wastewater to ETH waste collection points once a week and send this wastewater for incineration (burning). Not only is this approach highly unsustainable, but the ash produced from burning wastewater has recently been shown to release toxins into the air. As large companies have to follow the same protocols for discharging their toxic wastewater, I realised that this is a global problem. So, I pursued this line of research for my PhD and the result is Oxyle.

Oxyle is a clean-tech company that provides advanced wastewater remediation by targeting, treating and removing highly problematic micropollutants from wastewater in an eco-friendly manner. Our technology can remove organic contaminants like hormones, antibiotics, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, insecticides, chemicals and a wide variety of other pollutants that end up in wastewater and pose significant health risks to humans and aquatic ecosystems. These pollutants are non-biodegradable and bio accumulative in nature and, due to their highly persistent form, they cannot be efficiently treated with existing filtration or absorption techniques.

It is good that we are living in a time where our chosen subject is getting a lot of attention. To pick up on the topicality, we specifically focused on treating contaminants that were recently covered in the media like banned pesticides and EDC compounds. With our cost-effective and sustainable treatment, we can remove over 95% of these contaminants in a short amount of time. Our reactors treat wastewater which can subsequently be sent to regular municipal wastewater treatment plants, and hence, prevent wastewater incineration. Now, Oxyle can provide a solution to tackle this global water contamination crisis. Luckily, environmental awareness in Switzerland is high. So, we are hoping for tougher regulations to put pressure on certain industries and for implementation of stringent effluent standards.

What is your motivation and what challenges do you currently face?

Every day in the start-up world is an adventure. Our motivation is to prove that our technology works not only in the lab but also in the field at our customer sites. Testimonials and feedback are therefore hugely important and there is still a lot we can learn to improve. As we speak, our wastewater treatment prototype is treating the wastewater of a large Swiss municipal wastewater treatment plant. So far, our treatment has been working well and we are obtaining many promising results. By October, we will have successfully completed this pilot and will be ready to showcase the results to interested target customer groups and investors. This is our first paid on-site customer pilot; something we are happy about and very proud of. Our goal is to get our innovation "out there" as soon as possible.

Good luck to your whole team. In June 2020, you won the Grand Prize of Venture. Tell us about this prize and what it means to you.

For us, the restrictions implemented during COVID-19 were a blessing in disguise. The deadline to submit applications to the Venture competition was the end of March, and until then it hadn’t been on my radar. However from mid-March, due to the COVID restrictions, we had to stop working in the labs at ETH Zurich, so I decided to dedicate my ‘working at home’ time towards improving our business plan and raising funds. We submitted our application to the Venture competition one day before the deadline. This year about 350 highly innovative and promising companies applied to this competition, and some of them were founded many years ago. When we entered the competition we were not even a company in the legal sense, so we felt the pressure of the competition and that only drove us to improve Oxyle’s commercial strategy even further. We entered this competition as we saw it as an important learning tool and since the company is still very young, we didn’t really expect to win. Looking back, I can happily say that we efficiently used this time to progress in other important aspects of our business development.

During the competition, we had to pitch in front of a jury several times and go through different selection stages. We learnt more and more from each of these pitching stages. Oxyle, for example, was the only company to be selected as a candidate for both the Audience Award and the Jury Award of the Venture competition. Throughout this competition we took notes on the feedback provided by the jury members and worked on improving our pitch and on presenting our vision to the jury as clearly as possible. The final pitch took place in June in front of a jury comprised of the biggest names in industry, many of whom we consider our target customers. On the award ceremony day, we learnt that we had not only won the first place in our vertical i.e. the Industrials and Engineering vertical, but that we had also won the overall competition. We were honestly very shocked but also immensely happy. We are extremely proud and honoured to carry the title of Venture competition’s 2020 Grand Prize Winner.

Going through and winning this competition gave us great visibility and credibility. We now have our foot in the door of many target customers, partners and investors who are seriously interested in working with us. We are confident that we can reach our planned milestones and stay on track for our project timelines. You see, I definitely don’t have a nine-to-five job.

Is there any advice you would like to give students?

The biggest thing I have learned is to trust my gut feeling and follow my passion, no matter what others say. When I was 17 and left home to pursue my studies I didn’t have a concrete plan about what I wanted to achieve in the future. When I look back now, I have realised that that’s totally fine. In the past decade, I have learnt to trust my instincts and have faith and confidence in my capabilities. I encourage students to seek advice from their parents, mentors and professors, but ultimately, they should pursue their passion and do what brings them joy. I highly recommend taking risks and embarking on new adventures, as we never know in advance what we will learn from taking on new challenges. Lastly, surround yourself with positive people and learn from their collective experiences with an open mind. To sum up, I chose to live my life on my own terms, and I hope anyone reading this can and will do the same.