UAF startup co-founders win pitch contest

September 30, 2019

University Relations

UAF's Nigel Sharp and Jonathan Kamler won the Accelerate Alaska pitch contest in the "newcomers" category.

Aquagga Inc. was started this summer as a spin-out of a UAF technology invented by co-founders Kamler, a Ph.D. candidate at UAF, and Sharp, UAF's entrepreneur in residence. Their mission is to make a social impact for the world by developing technologies that can both treat and find added value from wastewater while providing innovative solutions that are more energy-efficient and that save water. Their tagline is "Waste Water Redefined."

Aquagga won second place in this year's Alaska Seed Fund competition, was invited to the U.S. Department of Energy's Innovation XLab event in Tennessee, was granted a TREND SBIR Phase 0 award, and most recently won the "Best New Pitch" award at Accelerate Alaska.

The Aquagga team plans to continue developing their product ideas based on customer and market discovery work they will engage in this fall. You can learn more by signing up for updates on their website.

One 55-gallon barrel of the green sludge (human waste) has a recoverable energy content of around two gallons of diesel fuel, which in turn has an economic value equivalent to about two weeks of wages for the people dumping the waste. In some areas, up to 25,000 barrels per day of waste is dumped in areas like the Korogocho slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Along with creating a biohazard, they are dumping the equivalent of six months worth of wages into the river on a daily basis. The economic impact of avoiding that is staggering. Aquagga is developing technologies to help change the waste into wages.