Looking Back on 2018
2018 was an equally exhilarating and terrifying roller coaster, and as we look forward to 2019 it’s hard not to take a moment to reflect on everything that we’ve accomplished and all the challenges we’ve overcome. Here are a few of our proudest moments.
At the beginning of 2018, we had just come back from the EU. Our NuTree concept had been tested, and it was time to get to work on a fully-fledged NuTree system. But we had one big problem - no place to work!
In the heart of Silicon Valley, with sky-high rent, we did what any good maker would do - build it. We immediately began work converting CTO Ari Ochoa’s home into a makeshift workshop (see before and after pics above) and started to build the foundations of our NuTree.
After 6 months of hard labor, an enormous amount of sawdust (which we tried our best to repurpose for compost), and help from a few friends, we finished the main structure of our system.
Still, the harder job was still ahead of us as it was time to move onto building the biological part of the NuTree. After several muddy afternoons we had an engineered wetland ecosystem and our seedlings were sprouting up into our vertical farming attachment.
This was our favorite time of year. In the last few months of summer, as the warm nights gave way to a brisk fall, our workshop was full of greenery, plants growing strong for harvest, and the sound of water trickling through the NuTree like a fountain.
Though peaceful, it was also time to start testing! We started with some fun, tasty homebrewing recipes. Eventually our NuTree successfully treated industrial strength brewery wastewater from our first customer, Steel Bonnet, and removed over 99% of both BOD and TSS contaminants.
Today, our workshop is a fully functional greenhouse, complete with a few solar lights, as well as perhaps a few more powertools than we sometimes know what to do with. Creating our own makerspace, and all that our workshop now holds, is one of our proudest accomplishments. But like any good group of entrepreneurs we were doing a lot more than just building tech in our workshop!
We’ve had the pleasure of building relationships with local breweries like Fort Point, Faultline Brewing, and of course Steel Bonnet. Always looking for ways we can give back to the education sector, we also made time to reach out to local schools like Foothill College and Warms Springs Elementary to help inspire the next generation of scientists and entrepreneurs!
We were also making waves pitching and presenting at several events, including OnePiece OnePitch contest (we brought home first place!) and the 5th annual WCS talks. Thanks to the continuous support of our community, we presented at the GreenBiz VERGE18 conference for their circular economy competition. This was a huge event for us and we wouldn’t have been able to it without our supporters so thank you so much to everyone who voted for us!
We also started working on our smaller aquaponics NuTree “Bonsai”. Complete with a fish called Wanda! (pictured below) The Bonsai is now on its second harvest with a new family of fish (all christened Cosmo). The Bonsai has been thriving for months now! Towards the very end of the year, we also started designing our latest NuTree Garden system and started our winter harvest of Kale, mustard greens, peas, and a few flowering plants.
Here we are in 2019. Building a startup, carving your vision into the world, is a miraculous opportunity that we are grateful for everyday. We are especially grateful for another upcoming year, and look forward to bringing our technology to a larger community.
From all us here at NuLeaf, thank you for all of the support you have given us in 2018. There were more than a few times when our community came through for us and we are eternally grateful to all of you. We have a lot of exciting news to share with you in the new year and we hope you will stay tuned!
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