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Remedy Scientific, which cleans up toxic dirt, has emerged from stealth with an $11 million seed round, the company tells Axios exclusively. 

Why it matters: Contaminated sites are a major environmental, economic and health problem, and the issue has become worse because of this year's  enormous wildfires in LA. 

What's next: The company, based in the American Steel blocks of West Oakland, plans to raise more funding later this year to develop its tech's capacity to clean more kinds of contaminants, says Aikin says.

Driving the news: The seed round came from industrial-focused VC Eclipse, Zal Bilmoria's Refactor, deep tech VC Cantos, and early stage tech investors Box Group.

Eclipse incubated the company and helped develop it from the ground up. Remedy Scientific's founder and CEO Randol Aikin is a "Venture Founder" with Eclipse. 

Funding proceeds will help Remedy Scientific finish building its first mobile sensing and cleaning units for a pilot project at a toxic site in the Bay Area in the coming weeks, and for a government contract toward the end of this year.

The big picture: Environmental remediation is a slow, long and local process, Aikin says. "It's not an exaggeration to say that sites take decades to clean up."

The cleanup can be so time-consuming and expensive that it's not uncommon for soil to be excavated and hauled to a toxic landfill to sit in perpetuity. 

Remedy Scientific says its tech can reduce the time of cleaning sites to days and weeks, instead of months and years, and it is pricing the cost of its cleanup similar to the cost of hauling toxic dirt.

How it works: Founded in 2023, Remedy Scientific has developed sensing and cleaning units that it can deploy quickly and inexpensively to sites to rapidly clean up toxic dirt. 

The company's first focus are "forever chemicals" (polyfluoroalkyl substances , or PFAS), which are a class of thousands of chemicals that don't break down easily. 

The sensing units can test dozens of samples onsite using a mass spectrometer and robotic arms. The cleaning unit takes the toxic soil and runs it through a machine that operates like an industrial grinder and mechanically grinds down the PFAS into a non-toxic substance. 

The test results from the sensing unit are fed to algorithms that calibrate the machine to most efficiently clean the dirt. 

What we're watching: If the tech can scale beyond PFAS, it could prove useful for toxic sites like those contaminated by the LA wildfires. 

Exclusive: Remedy Scientific raises $11M to clean toxic dirt

Toxic sites are a major environmental, health and economic issue aggravated by recent wildfires.

A machine that grinds down forever chemicals and cleans toxic soil, in a warehouse in Oakland, Calif.

In a warehouse in Oakland, Calif., Remedy Scientific's reactor grinds down forever chemicals to clean toxic soil. Photo: Courtesy of Joseph Seif.

Remedy Scientific, which cleans up toxic dirt, has emerged from stealth with an $11 million seed round, the company tells Axios exclusively. Why it matters: Contaminated sites are a major environmental, economic and health problem, and the issue has become worse because of this year&#x27;s <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="enormous wildfires in LA. " data-vars-click-url="https://www.axios.com/2025/01/12/la-wildfires-gavin-newsom-natural-disaster" data-vars-content-id="c83c7edb-c373-49c9-9f41-740ef6528862" data-vars-headline="Exclusive: Remedy Scientific raises $11M to clean toxic dirt" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.axios.com/2025/01/12/la-wildfires-gavin-newsom-natural-disaster" target="_self">enormous wildfires in LA. </a>

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Exclusive: Remedy Scientific raises $11M to clean toxic dirt

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