He feeds factories their own garbage and hands back the chemicals they were paying to import.
There is a white powder piling up behind every battery plant on Earth. Lukas Hackl is the rare person who got excited about it.
The powder is sodium sulfate. It is dull, it is harmless, and it is everywhere the energy transition goes. Make a gigawatt-hour of batteries and you produce roughly 5,000 metric tons of the stuff. In China you can sell it to detergent makers. In the United States and Europe you mostly pay to haul it away, while buying back the very chemicals you could have pulled out of it. One BASF cathode plant in Finland was denied an environmental permit over exactly this waste.
Hackl runs Aepnus Technology, a company whose entire premise is that this is a loop, not a line. His electrolyzers take the discarded salt and split it back into sulfuric acid and caustic soda, the two reagents battery factories were importing by the tanker. The waste goes in one end. The shopping list comes out the other.
“Electrolytic manufacturing is the key to decarbonizing chemical manufacturing, broadly speaking.” - Lukas Hackl, CEO, Aepnus Technology
Two exchange students, a long road trip, and the same complaint at every stop.
Hackl trained as a mechanical engineer, earning a master's at ETH Zurich before crossing the Atlantic. At UC Berkeley he met Bilen Akuzum, a fellow exchange student who would, more than a decade later, become his co-founder. Hackl's PhD work, carried out at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was on electrochemical water desalination - the unglamorous science of pulling salt out of where you don't want it.
In 2020 the pair toured the upstream battery supply chain across California and Nevada, then drove north toward Canada. Miners said it. Mineral processors said it. Cell makers said it. The same bottleneck kept surfacing: chemical waste, mountains of it, sitting next to invoices for chemicals being shipped in. A desalination researcher heard a desalination problem hiding inside the biggest industrial story of the decade.
The lab technique had a second life. The company was named Aepnus, and Hackl became its CEO.
“The problem that kept popping up - whether we were talking to folks recycling batteries, mining battery minerals, or making battery cells - was this waste stream issue.” - Lukas Hackl, on Aepnus's customer discovery
Salt in. Acid and soda out. Electricity does the rest.
Aepnus builds an electrolyzer - metal electrodes separated by membranes - that runs renewable electricity through waste sodium sulfate and pulls it apart. The trick is what it leaves out. By replacing expensive catalysts with cheaper materials, Hackl's team claims roughly 60% lower stack costs than PEM electrolyzers and about 30% better energy efficiency than conventional designs. The whole unit is about the size of a pickup truck and is built to chew through some 20,000 tons of salt a year.
The economics, in one picture. Aepnus says it regenerates about $700 of chemicals per ton of salt at a cost of roughly $350.
The money behind the salt.
Led the $8M seed round and made the case publicly for why electrified chemical manufacturing is the bet to make.
Lowercarbon Capital and Voyager Ventures joined alongside Impact Science, Muus Climate Partners and Gravity Climate Fund.
Aepnus validated its platform through a formal CRADA collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The small things that explain the big bet.
“Start with battery waste. Then lithium refining, metals processing, CO2 electrolysis. The ambition is gigaton-scale, and it's all the same idea: stop making chemicals the dirty way.” - The Aepnus thesis, in plain terms
Where to read more about Lukas Hackl and Aepnus Technology.