Minimizing aluminum waste, maximizing their potential: the story of Hydrova

February 2022 | Sam Kizner, MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program

Thanks to their discovery of a novel chemical process, Rostam Reifschneider and Julian Davis are pioneering change in the aluminum industry.

Rostam Reifschneider ’21 and Julian Davis, co-founders of the clean-tech startup Hydrova, have always had an entrepreneurial spirit. The duo – who struck up a friendship in high school – both had a passion for topics in the STEM field and a desire to collaborate. Somewhat serendipitously, it was the COVID-19 pandemic that brought these friends back together to create something great.

Today, Hydrova is a clean-tech startup that is turning waste from the aluminum industry into economic value. This is all powered by a novel chemical process that converts dross and salt cake, which are waste byproducts of aluminum recycling, into valuable solids and green hydrogen with no remaining waste. Reifschneider and Davis invented the process after they made a discovery while studying aluminum-based hydrogen production methods back in early 2020 – an opportunity they had only after being sent home to take remote classes due to the pandemic.

Reifschneider says this discovery intrigued the both of them due to aluminum’s ability to be recycled an infinite amount of times without losing its quality.

“Aluminum is one of the most sustainably recyclable materials we have in modern society,” Reifschneider explained. “An aluminum can is used to make another aluminum can rather than another downgraded product. However, when you melt down an aluminum can, a small percentage of that material turns into a waste byproduct. And due to the sheer quantity of aluminum the world uses every year, billions of pounds of this waste byproduct end up being produced and going to landfill every year.”

They undertook the task of learning as much as they could – all from a small set-up in Reifschneider’s garage.

However, being across the country from MIT’s labs and resources made early investigation difficult. This is the point at which MIT’s Sandbox Innovation Fund Program entered the picture. The program provides teams of students with seed funding, mentorship, and entrepreneurial education. The goal of the program is to help any MIT student experience entrepreneurship while propelling their innovations.

“We applied to Sandbox to get some funding so that we could actually start running experiments on our own out here in San Diego,” Reifschneider explained. “They were incredibly supportive and gave us some initial funding to get that lab equipment set up and start running experiments. While we were doing our classes remotely on Zoom, we would constantly be suiting up in protective lab gear and then taking it off between classes.”

The two achieved great success with this funding, and were able to explore this chemical process in more depth and detail. While Reifschneider and Davis had gone their separate ways for college, with each studying subjects in the STEM fields, they knew it was time to come together and collaborate – something they’d already done years prior.

“We actually always had this entrepreneurial bug. Back in high school, we were the co-presidents of the Business Club and we competed in all these pitch competitions,” Reifschneider recalls. “Those were good introductory experiences to entrepreneurship. Then we both went to study STEM at MIT and Georgetown, and when COVID hit we reconnected, decided to put our newly acquired STEM backgrounds to use, and start a business for real.”

Off the bat, the pair took on a customer-focused approach. Reifschneider attributes their early achievements to consistent communication with stakeholders. He also pointed out that beyond funding, Sandbox was instrumental in helping the co-founders overcome challenges and remain tenacious in these first few months of launching their startup.

A pivotal challenge came in those early months, in fact. The co-founders were performing a series of financial calculations that led them to realize that producing hydrogen from pure aluminum didn’t make economic sense. In other words, the technology they initially had been working to create may not actually make sense to sell.

“This was the point at which most people would have turned around and given up, realizing the numbers just don't work out,” Reifschneider explained. “But instead, we looked deeper at the process of aluminum recycling and realized there's actually this inherent waste challenge and environmental problem in the form of dross and salt cake that we can help solve with our technology.”

This hiccup helped Reifschneider and Davis realize Hydrova’s true offering to their community of investors and customers: alleviating the dross and salt cake waste issue. Reifschneider recalls the role of their mentors in helping them pivot – who both pressed the founders to redouble their customer discovery efforts.

“We were talking to our mentors, Ira Hochman and Raghav Gupta, and that was when they pushed us to double down on customer discovery. We had to go back out to the people we were in touch with, talk to them and shift our frame of mind to just trying to understand their problems,” Reifschneider said. “That was when we actually learned about dross and salt cake. We realized that these aluminum manufacturers are dealing with this hazardous waste challenge, and that's an expensive headache for them that we could solve.”

Thanks to this guidance from their mentors – and a lot of hard work on their own – Reifschneider and Davis are pioneering a new way of creating economic value out of drosses and salt cakes that have traditionally been landfilled. The San Diego-based startup still maintains contact with their Sandbox mentors today, even as their work has shifted to bringing their technology to market.

Reifschneider says their long term goal is for “Hydrova to become a leading innovator in the aluminum industry, focused on waste reduction and decarbonization.”

“We see huge opportunities to repurpose industrial waste that would otherwise go to landfill and then also use green hydrogen to help decarbonize an industry that's responsible for 2% of global emissions today,” he explained.

Reifschneider even notes that there is room for expansion beyond the aluminum industry, and that their technology could have impacts across various sectors. While their focus remains on aluminum today, Hydrova’s track record shows that anything is possible.