Priyanka Bakaya

Priyanka Bakaya is an Australian-American entrepreneur. She founded PK Clean, a clean energy company which converts plastic waste into fuel, and serves as its chief executive officer.^[1][2][3][4]

Biography

Bakaya grew up in Australia, where she attended Lauriston Girls' School.^[3][5][6] Her mother worked as a CPA and her father was a financial services entrepreneur.^[3] Bakaya is of Kashmiri descent.^[7] As a child, she developed her interest in science through interacting with Percy Kean, an inventor who developed solutions for clean energy and was close to her family.^[1][6]

Bakaya attended Stanford University for her undergraduate education in economics and technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology for an MBA.^[8] After graduating from Stanford, she took a position as an energy research analyst at Lehman in New York City.^[1] Kean died in 2007; around the same time, oil prices rose by twice their original price.^[1] Bakaya decided to apply Kean's discoveries and found PK Clean in 2009,^[3] applying to MIT to give her the skills necessary to found the business.^[1] The company's name was derived from Kean's initials.^[1][3] She started working with co-founder Benjamin Coates in 2011, when they were Lightspeed Venture Fellows in California.^[9]

In 2012, PK Clean moved to Salt Lake City, where it set up a facility with the capacity to convert 20,000 pounds of non-recycled plastic to 60 barrels of oil each day^[3] and zero toxic emissions,^[10] using the depolymerization process.^[11] The company was awarded MIT's Clean Energy Prize^[12] in 2011^[13] and third place in the Rice University Business Plan Super Bowl.^[14] That year, Bakaya was the recipient of the $10,000 prize for female entrepreneurs at the Rice Business Plan Competition.^[15] In December 2012, Bakaya was featured by Forbes as one of its 30 Under 30 in the Energy category.^[16] In 2013, Fortune named Bakaya as one of its 40 Under 40 to watch.^[10]

Bakaya was the North American Laureate for the Cartier Women’s Initiative Award in 2013.^[17] In 2014, she was featured in Marie Claire as a One Woman Genius and in Elle as 12 Genius Young Women Shaping the Future. ^{[18] [19]} In 2015, she gave a TEDx talk on the Power of Waste.^[20]

References