Orianna Bretschger, CEO of wastewater treatment company Aquacycl, grew up without home sewage services in several rural towns across America.
Now she’s helping disrupt the long-stagnant world of wastewater management.
Co-founder & CEO
Aquacycl Inc.
“I was potty trained in an outhouse – it’s a true story,” said Bretschger, whose Escondido-based company for nearly seven years has provided industrial wastewater treatment as a service to businesses looking to address water quality issues.
Aquacycl currently counts PepsiCo, Anheuser-Busch and Aspen Distillers in Colorado as partners in cleaning up their respective industrial wastewater with its BioElectrical Treatment Technology (BETT) system that generates direct electricity from bacteria in the wastewater.
BETT cleans contaminated water before it flows down into the drain via microbial fuel cells that clean wastewater. It uses naturally existing bacteria to convert organic waste and sludge into direct electricity without any methane production, treating wastewater that is five to 10 times stronger than the current industry standard.
The company has seen a steady growth of 20% to 30% revenue increase since 2017, one year after it was co-founded by Bretschger and Sofia Babanova. Aquacycl has raised just over $19 million over the past seven years though angel investors, impact funds, family offices and corporate venture capital. Its Series B closes at the end of October.
Bretschger founded Aquacycl with Babanova after working nearly 10 years as a researcher and professor at the J. Craig Venter Institute, the La Jolla-headquartered laboratory focused on genomic research and scientific breakthroughs.
‘Change in Water Management’
Brestchger said that currently, only 20% of global wastewaters are receiving adequate treatment, the other 80% are discharged into the environment with minimal to no treatment. This 20% accounts for more GHG emissions than the entire shipping industry.
The company’s solution allows it to treat that remaining 80% in a sustainable way without devastating climate effects.
Co-founder & CTO
Aquacycl Inc.
“Aquacycl’s overarching goal is to serve as a catalyst for change — change in water management, change in public perception of water and change in water technologies,” Babanova said. “Our focus is particularly within the wastewater sector, where innovation has remained stagnant for the past century.”
Wastewater is any water that has been exposed to a contaminant or that human activity has made unclean, typically from water used in the home – from the toilets, sink or shower. According to Organica Water, wastewater from the private sector contributes to the 1.2 trillion gallons of industrial waste, stormwater and sewage that are dumped – untreated – into U.S. waters.
Bretschger said Aquacycl was initially founded to create distributed wastewater treatment to address water scarcity and lack of infrastructure in low-income countries but has grown to provide onsite services to the industrial sector.
“Aquacycl fills a unique niche in the environmental services industry by treating non-diluted waste streams that are typically problematic for centralized treatment and/or will be hauled away to landfill,” Bretschger said. “The technology works in many applications across the sector; however, we are focusing on this area as a way to gain initial market share.”
International Expansion
PepsiCo’s bottling company in Fresno is one of the company’s current contracted customers. PepsiCo was looking for help on its waste stream, which because of is high concentration of materials, was doubling the cost of is sewer charges.
PepsiCo’s plan is to become “net water positive” by 2030, and Aquacycl is delivering with its system and also helping PepsiCo mitigate its greenhouse gas emissions. Its initial one-year pilot with PepsiCo resulted in less waste, a 30% reduction in costs and 100 tons fewer GHG emissions per month.
Aquacycl is currently negotiating with another large bottler in the U.S., with more growth planned.
“For us it’s really scaling what we know works,” Bretschger said. “We provide this as a containerized service by month or how much organic waste we take out of the water. We slice the pie any way the customer wants to get the deal closed.”
Aquacycl also recently opened offices in The Netherlands to address the European market, where environmental concerns are stricter and enforced. She said the Netherlands, Singapore and Israel are “the three countries in the world who manage water well and really value water re-use and water technology.”
“We have much greater opportunity to help our clients in terms of cost savings and sustainability,” she said of its overseas presence.
Aquacycl manufactures one component in-house and has third-party vendors in South Korea, Tijuana and across the U.S. It has a vendor in Chula Vista that retrofits its containers. It assembles, does quality control and quality assurance in Escondido before shipping, installing, commissioning and starting operations for customers.
Aquacycl Inc.
FOUNDED: 2016
CO-FOUNDERS: Orianna Bretschger, Sofia Babanova
HEADQUARTERS: Escondido
BUSINESS: B2B Environmental Services
REVENUE: $730,000 (2022)
EMPLOYEES: 28
WEBSITE: aquacycl.com
CONTACT: info@aquacycl.com
SOCIAL IMPACT: Bretschger has volunteered since 2019 with the VIIDAI (Viajes Interinstitucional de Integracion Docente, Asistencial y de Investigacion) program (a collaboration of SDSU, UCSD, the Autonomous University of Baja California and the Rotary Club of Old Mission San Diego) to help build out water purification systems at a school in San Quintin, Mexico.
NOTABLE: The company is a finalist for The Fix Our Climate Earthshot Prize, a global environmental award that seeks to identify and grow the solutions that will repair the Earth in the next decade. Winners will be announced in November.
