Krish Mehta,
CEO of PHNX Materials

📍 Current City: San Francisco (San Francisco Bay Area).

💡 Superpower: Blending business and engineering.

🏆 Fun Fact: He is obsessed with Roger Federer and was the first person in the world to receive official Roger Federer Uniqlo merchandise.

🎓 Education: Stanford MBA + MS, Class of 2024. Specifically, he holds an MBA + MS in Climate from Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where he participated in the E-IPER joint MBA + MS in Climate tech program. He is also a Knight-Hennessy Scholar (KHS). Prior to Stanford, he attended Penn Wharton + Eng, Class of 2018, earning a B.Sc. in Economics, Energy Finance | Statistics from the University of Pennsylvania – The Wharton School.

📞 Claim to Fame: Transforming coal ash through a revolutionary technology to reclaim landfilled coal ash and refine it into critical products. His work is crucial for mining coal ash as an abundant domestic natural resource to secure critical products.

Entrepreneurial Journey

Krish Mehta is the CEO of PHNX Materials, a company founded on the mission of reclaiming, refining, and reinventing yesterday’s coal ash waste into tomorrow’s critical solutions. His ambition to confront climate change originated from witnessing its devastating impact on vulnerable communities in India. This experience fueled his conviction that climate innovation must be commercially viable to achieve large-scale impact. Mehta dedicated his time at Penn and Stanford to studying both engineering and business to pursue this vision.

Prior to launching PHNX, he gained significant experience in heavy industries: he managed the Model 3 P&L (profit and loss) at Tesla for a year and a half (Jan 2021 – Jun 2022), where he received the highest performance rank in both categories (‘demonstrates excellence’ and ‘positively impacts others’). He also advised Fortune 500 companies as an Engagement Manager and Sustainability Fellow in McKinsey’s Sustainability Practice (Aug 2018 – Jan 2021), achieving the fastest promotion to manager ever in the sustainability practice and across the New York and Boston Tech practice. He was rated the highest rank (top 5, distinctive) in every review cycle at McKinsey.

PHNX Materials transforms contaminated landfilled coal ash, addressing the vast environmental issue posed by the 2.9 billion tons (sometimes cited as over 3 billion tons) of coal ash currently sitting in U.S. landfills. The company leverages cutting-edge chemistry to create sustainable resources, which include:

1. Lower-cost building materials (Supplementary Cementitious Materials/SCMs).
2. Critical metals (Aluminum, Rare Earths).
3. Fertilizers.

The core problems PHNX solves are massive: tackling climate change (cement is responsible for 8% of global CO₂ emissions), waste remediation, and securing domestic material supply chains. The solution is exciting because it aligns environmental benefits with economic incentives, unlocking new revenue for incumbents, reducing landfill liabilities, and improving supply chain resilience.

Mehta, who is an Activate Fellow and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30, officially announced PHNX Materials in 2023. The journey has moved rapidly; just one year after its inception, the company moved from concept to deployment.

Key Milestones and Infrastructure:

• PHNX’s SF pilot facility is officially live, producing 0.5 tons/day of SCM and fertilizers.
• The company is setting up a continuous, on-site Commercial Pilot Facility in Ohio, which will process up to 600 tons of coal ash per year into low-cost cement substitutes and fertilizers.
• The Ohio Department of Development supported this vision with a $2M grant.
• PHNX received the Outstanding Achievement Award at the Defense Logistics Agency’s Collider Day, recognizing the national security impact of securing a domestic source of critical minerals by extracting them from coal ash.

Mehta credits Stanford for shaping the mindset and providing the infrastructure needed for PHNX. The university served as a launchpad, offering programs like the TomKat Center (early funding and mentorship), the Stanford Impact Fellowship (freedom to pursue PHNX full-time), and technical foundations for scaling hard-tech solutions via the Doerr School.

Looking ahead, the goal is for PHNX to operate multiple full-scale plants in five years, processing hundreds of thousands of tons of coal ash annually. Success will look like lowering infrastructure costs in the region by 15%, creating jobs for over 300 individuals, and avoiding 2M tons of CO2 per year. Mehta notes that the biggest current challenge is navigating the stakeholder maze (utilities, regulators, investors, buyers) and orchestrating the entire ecosystem to move in sync.

Krish Mehta’s driving mission is clear: to develop climate technologies that simultaneously bend the emissions curve and the equity curve.