Student startup aims for cleaner water

Growing up in Arlington, Va, James Licato ‘25 found inspiration from the nearby Potomac River.

“That river is one of the most contaminated in the country,” Licato said. ”When I was in middle school and early high school, I wondered why it was so incredibly contaminated. Why can't the most technologically advanced nation in the world protect the river that flows right through its capital?”

It was a question that led him - while still a high school student - to tour treatment facilities and secure a position as a laboratory intern and later research assistant at George Mason University. And as a second-year student at Yale, it led him to start Catala, a fledgling water treatment company that has received federal funding as well as funding from Yale. The company, which also counts graduate student Claire Chouinard and Prof. Jaehong Kim as its founding members, builds catalytic membranes as a means of eliminating pollutants and impurities from wastewater. 

Although they’re still figuring out their exact clientele, the Catala team is generally looking at industrial wastewaters - the kind that produce organic pollutants like oils, greases, and PFAS. 

Chouinard points to a prototype of their technology in a lab on the fifth floor of 17 Hillhouse. For their catalyst, they’re using a transition metal-based material for advanced oxidation. Although advanced oxidation has been used in other systems, the Catala team chose to use a solid material rather than ions dissolved in a solution. 

“We want to use a solid material because it's easy to recover,” Chouinard said. “It can reduce the amount of metal loss to the environment, so it costs less and is safer.” 

They first began to seriously consider starting a company when Yale Ventures launched its Roberts Innovation Fund in 2022, which provides funding and mentoring for Yale-led projects to assist in the commercialization of breakthrough inventions that solve real-world problems.

“That really sparked our interest in potentially pursuing a path towards commercialization,” Licato said. “At the time, I didn't really know what [commercialization] meant, especially coming from an academic ecosystem and having really no experience in industry or in entrepreneurship.” 

They didn't get the funding that round, but they soon after successfully applied for a $50,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program, which provides entrepreneurial training and the resources that researchers need to adapt their discoveries in the lab into marketable products.

“It’s a very intense seven-week program,” Licato said. “You have to speak with more than 100 different people, basically asking what the problems are in their industry. That was super helpful for us.” 

They gained another victory when they applied again for the Roberts Innovation Fund, this time succeeding. They've since impressed enough investors to fund a pilot program.  

“We're really just trying to nail down a target industry,” he said. “So right now, we're pursuing the semiconductors industry.” This sector tends to produce wastewater that contains corrosion inhibitors, which are difficult to remove using conventional advanced oxidation processes. 

The difference between how industry and academia typically approach things posed something of a learning curve. For one, Licato said, he found that companies were less interested in a system that worked perfectly than one that worked well enough and was reliable. 

“They really care about how long it works,” he said. “If something works decently well, but lasts forever, they’ll take that any day of the week over something that has superb performance but [doesn't last very long]. It is an economics issue. That's something that we've now had to incorporate into our research and into our experiments.”

Part of that meant adjusting how they test their systems and set their goals. In short, their product has to be inexpensive, easy to use, and able to run for a really long time.

“To sell a commercial product, it's all about what a customer needs,” Chouinard said. “And academic research typically does not run that way. So it's been a very interesting learning experience to think about how we can move a project like this, which was originally funded by the National Science Foundation to something that people will buy.”