Like many, Doug Speight—the former Executive Director of Durham startup community American Underground—considered the direction he wanted his career to take when the world slowed down during Covid.
“During COVID, we were staring at our mortality in the face every single day,” Speight said. “I realized that I wanted to focus on something that was of greater value to society as a whole, rather than just developing another enterprise software or platform.”
So, it was a natural fit when serial entrepreneur Speight got the opportunity to become the CEO of AxNano, a tech startup that treats water polluted by PFAS chemicals.
Founded in 2011, AxNano is a post-launch, early commercialization research and development services startup HQ’d in Greensboro. He will be presenting the AxNano story at CED’s Venture Connect summit in Raleigh on March 20-21.
AxNano has two products that work together. The first product is a mobile system that concentrates PFAS chemicals from a polluted body of water so that it’s easier to destroy the chemicals with the second product.
The second product destroys 99.99 percent of the PFAS chemicals in the concentrated water. Clients can either have the concentrated water shipped to the second product for PFAS destruction or have the product brought to the site, assuming they have the utilities to support it.
The polluted water is safe to return to its originating body of water after it’s gone through both of AxNano’s products, but it is not drinkable.
AxNano provides the client with the system, but the client must provide its own labor to collect and concentrate the water. The first product costs approximately $200,000 while the second product costs about $3 million.
The startup has a client base headlined by the Army and Air Force, which it leases its products to on a long-term basis. Speight said the government allocates $6.4 million in government contracts to provide these types of technologies, and AxNano recently landed a $2 million contract with the Army to provide its two products.
AxNano beat its competitors out for significant contracts with the Army and Air Force in large part because it started by improving test-proven products that had been developed using military funding.
“The key for us is that we get such a unique opportunity to leapfrog the initial development stages of technology commercialization by pulling in these products that have been developed using military funding,” Speight said. “It allows us to focus on how to optimize those technologies quickly so that we can get them into the field.”
Funding from venture capitalists has also helped AxNano achieve success. The startup has raised $3 million from 13 investors. Many of these investors are from the Triad, most notably Dennis Stearns, the Founder of Greensboro-based Stearns Financial Group.
Speight said that AxNano is close to raising another $7 million so that it can scale and fulfill some of its recently awarded contracts. AxNano’s No. 1 priority for the immediate future is ensuring they put themselves in a position to fulfill the contracts they’ve secured so far. The startup then aims to start working on two new products and expand to more commercial clients after fulfilling those contracts.
The new products will essentially be faster, smaller and more affordable versions of its current products, according to Speight. He said that new marketing strategies, complemented by its new products, will be targeted at gaining clients in the commercial sector, such as Waste Management or Shamrock Environmental.
The ultimate goal is to then be acquired by one of these companies so that AxNano can access its distribution network.
“There are a lot of large companies in this waste management space […] that are starting to make investments in startups and earlier-stage technologies so that they can eventually roll them up into the larger corporation,” Speight said. “So we want to build stronger relationships with strategic investors in preparation of being acquired downstream.”
