Priyanka Bakaya

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] Renewlogy uses a continuous system of plastics, which saves energy by eliminating the need to reheat the system to the high temperature necessary for conversion.[12] The company was awarded MIT's Clean Energy Prize[13] in 2011[14] and third place in the Rice University Business Plan Super Bowl.[15] That year, Bakaya was the recipient of the $10,000 prize for female entrepreneurs at the Rice Business Plan Competition.[16] In December 2012, Bakaya was featured by Forbes as one of its 30 Under 30 in the Energy category.[17] 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.[18] In 2014, she was featured in Marie Claire as a One Woman Genius and in Elle as 12 Genius Young Women Shaping the Future. [19] [20] In 2015, she gave a TEDx talk on the Power of Waste.[21] In 2016, she won money from Steve Case as part of his Rise of the Rest Tour. [22] In 2018, she was recognized in the Waste Industry's 40 Under 40 list by Waste360. [23]