Sydney deep tech venture ALBON is pitching a low-energy, algae-based system to dairy, meat, rendering and other food processing operations facing rising water costs and tightening discharge rules. It has just been named as one of the Cicada x Tech23 2026 cohort.
Wastewater is one of the least glamorous and most expensive problems in food manufacturing, and a Sydney start-up thinks algae can fix part of it. ALBON treats the nutrient-heavy effluent produced by dairy, meat and other food processing with a modular algae and bacteria system, then converts the resulting biomass into biochar. The pitch to processors is lower energy use, fewer chemicals, less sludge, and a pathway to reuse water that would otherwise be discharged.
ALBON co-founder and CEO, John Phipps, told Food & Drink Business the sector rarely gets attention despite its scale.
“It certainly isn’t as flashy as a lot of the robotics and tech stuff that can come out, but food processing and all of the steps that go into it, it’s truly the backbone of humanity.
“We don’t really give it the time of day to think about what actually happens to a lot of the waste that gets produced from it,” he said.
Why the business model runs on water, not algae
Algae has a long history of commercial false starts, and Phipps is candid that the economics have sunk many earlier ventures.
“It’s quite challenging to create a product out of algae that is valuable enough to offset the cost of making it,” he said.
ALBON’s answer is to make the treatment service, not the algae, the product.
“Our approach is not to derive our business model from the algae that we sell, but more so the wastewater that we’re treating. That impact-led approach makes our financial model a lot more feasible than a lot of other algae companies.”
That framing matters to processors, who are the ones carrying the cost. One abattoir the founders spoke to early on was spending more than $2 million a year dealing with its wastewater.
Agri-food is the beachhead market. “Dairy, meat processing, rendering, all those industries produce quite a nutrient-heavy wastewater that when discharged out into the environment just wreaks havoc on a lot of local waterways,” Phipps said.
Those same nutrients also make the water hard to reuse without treatment, which is where ALBON sees its opening.
Keeping a living system alive
The technical hook is a data layer that Phipps argues was not available to earlier operators. Algae is a living organism, and managing the temperature, light, nutrient load and retention time by hand is closer to guesswork than science.
Phipps came to the problem from aquaculture, where he worked as a technical officer managing 200,000-litre bioreactors.
“We’re talking about something that’s alive. You can’t follow the static model for keeping all these bioreactors alive,” he said.
ALBON is building a machine learning model that aggregates wastewater data and sets the system’s operating conditions automatically, adjusting balancing tanks, lighting and hydraulic retention time before problems escalate.
Phipps is careful to distinguish it from the energy-hungry large language models now dominating the conversation.
“Operators currently make on-the-spot chemical dosing decisions that keep systems running but rarely optimised, and automating that is as much about scalability as day-to-day control.”
From backyard to deployment
ALBON was bootstrapped by its founders while they were still at university, a necessity given the cost of conventional infrastructure. “I don’t know if you’ve looked at the prices of wastewater treatment centres, but we’re talking multi-million dollars.”
The company has scaled in deliberate steps: a 70-litre backyard rig built with materials from Bunnings, then a 1000-litre system run with a council, and now its first industrial-scale deployment at a dairy.
“Transparently, we don’t know the challenges that will come with deploying at this size yet,” Phipps said. The main risk, he said, is whether the biology behaves the same way at industrial scale as it does in the lab.
Water reuse is the prize. Phipps points to worsening drought and rainfall variability across rural Australia, where many processing plants sit. ALBON is in early talks with a University of Sydney researcher to measure coliform bacteria levels before and after treatment, work that would establish how far the treated water can be reused, whether for irrigating grazing land or for factory wash-down.
A carbon-capture pivot
ALBON did not start out chasing wastewater.
“Our original mission was to see if we could farm carbon credits, just commercialise capturing carbon dioxide,” Phipps said.
The founders landed on algae because it captures CO2 around 40 times more efficiently than trees but struggled to build a business around a problem no single customer was willing to pay to solve.
The pivot came through a board connection at an abattoir grappling with a multi-million-dollar wastewater bill.
“We can address this problem with what we’ve been working on. We can solve that real pain point somebody’s actually willing to pay for while still accomplishing our original mission,” he said.
The carbon capture continues as a by-product of the treatment process.
Phipps argues the wider wastewater industry is overdue for disruption. “The wastewater industry is just incredibly archaic and monolithic,” he said, noting that a handful of global players dominate and that high barriers to entry slow innovation. If treatment costs can be cut upstream through lower energy use and no chemicals, he said, the saving should eventually flow downstream.
For processors, the timing lines up with mounting regulatory pressure. Many facilities are, in Phipps’ words, “looking down the barrel” of tightening environmental rules over the next five to 10 years, while thin margins leave little room to absorb rising utility and compliance costs.
Whether ALGON’s algae can hold up at industrial volumes remains the open question, and the founders are the first to say so. But with a paid dairy deployment in design and a Tech23 platform in September, the company is about to find out in front of the investors and processors it needs to convince.
The company was one of 23 ventures named to the Cicada x Tech23 2026 cohort, selected by deep tech incubator Cicada Innovations from a record 236 applicants. The cohort presents at Jones Bay Wharf in Sydney on 9 September. ALBON sits in the sustainability and agri-food end of a line-up that also spans satellites, semiconductors and medical diagnostics.
