Ones to Watch: Brian Pinkard

Brian Pinkard's engineering journey has taken him from destroying chemical weapons to tackling one of today’s most persistent environmental threats: toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances). As co-founder and CTO of Aquagga, Pinkard leads a startup developing technology to thermochemically destroy these pollutants at the source.

His leap from research to entrepreneurship began in 2019 through the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program. There, he and co-founders Nigel Sharp and Chris Woodruff began speaking with industry leaders and quickly heard a common refrain. “As soon as we started talking to people in the water industry, we just kept hearing about PFAS,” Pinkard recalled. “I had never even heard of PFAS before going through I-Corps.” That “light bulb moment” marked the beginning of Aquagga’s mission.

Aquagga has grown into a 22-person company with active projects, published work, and major customers like 3M—but that success was hard-won. “There were a number of years where we were kind of living paycheck to paycheck,” Pinkard said. “Only about three percent of clean tech VC funding historically goes to water startups, so keeping a company like ours alive is very challenging.” The team relied heavily on federal SBIR grants and support from agencies like the Department of Defense and Federal Aviation Administration to keep the company moving forward in its early days.

To read more about Brian Pinkard and his work, read his full profile in the Watch List 2025.

Sarah Alburakeh is strategic content editor.