Priyanka Bakaya | |
---|---|
Nationality | Australian-American |
Occupation | entrepreneur |
Known for | PK Clean |
Priyanka Bakaya is an Australian-American entrepreneur. She founded PK Clean, a clean energy company which converts plastic waste into new products, and served as its chief executive officer. [1] [2] [3] [4]
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]
In 2011, Bakaya was the recipient of the 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 Magazine as 12 Genius Young Women Shaping the Future. [18] [19] In 2015, she gave a TEDx talk on the Power of Waste. [20] In 2016, she won money from Steve Case as part of his Rise of the Rest Tour. [21]