industrial-chemicals
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Koppers makes wood outlast the weather
A railroad tie looks like a block of wood. Koppers sees a chemistry problem, a logistics problem, and a business that can last for decades.
ICL Group: The value inside the rock
A fertilizer granule, a plant-based burger, a flame-resistant circuit board. ICL connects them through mineral chemistry - and a costly battery detour shows where that logic reaches its limits.
Lukas Hackl
Lukas Hackl is the co-founder and CEO of Aepnus Technology, an Emeryville, California startup building electrolyzers that turn sodium sulfate waste - a salty byproduct piling up across the EV battery supply chain - back into the sulfuric acid and caustic soda that battery makers have to buy. The technology grew out of his UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory PhD work on electrochemical water desalination. After hearing the same waste complaint on road trips from California to Canada, he and co-founder Bilen Akuzum turned a laboratory curiosity into a company that emerged from stealth in 2024 with $8 million in seed funding led by Clean Energy Ventures.