Engineering News reported that Pee-Cycling took top honours in Cape Town’s GreenPitch challenge. The win puts the urine-to-fertiliser startup in front of judges and potential investors at a time when many innovators are looking for ways to stretch scarce resources.
GreenPitch is a competition that invites early-stage companies to pitch solutions that address South Africa’s environmental pressures, from water scarcity to waste overload. This year, 18 finalists, selected from more than 300 entries, pitched their innovations to a panel of judges and potential investors. The exact prize package for this year’s competition was not disclosed in the announcement.
For Pee-Cycling, the accolade could translate into a faster route to market. The company has been developing a system that captures human urine, treats it with a low-energy process and produces a nitrogen-rich fertiliser, along with clean non-potable water. If the technology scales, it could help farmers reduce dependence on imported fertiliser while cutting the volume of urine that ends up in municipal sewers.
The South African agriculture sector faces rising input costs and a need for more resilient nutrient sources. A locally produced, circular-economy fertiliser could therefore ease pressure on farm budgets and support food security goals.
From a business perspective, the win comes as the company is already working with a commercial partner. Pee-Cycling works with Bidvest Prestige, which will operate and maintain its system at Cape Town Stadium, a project delivered together with the City of Cape Town, according to Bizcommunity. The stadium project is still experimental, and the fertiliser has not yet been used. It gives the company a real-world testing ground and a credible reference for other sites.
What the win means for other small businesses
While the story centres on a single startup, it highlights a broader trend: South African businesses that can combine environmental impact with a clear revenue model are attracting attention from investors and competition judges alike.
For entrepreneurs in the waste-management space, Pee-Cycling’s success underscores the value of aligning product development with real problems, in this case, water conservation and nutrient recycling. It also shows that niche technologies can gain traction when they are presented in a format that is easy for non-technical audiences to understand.
Nevertheless, the path ahead is not without challenges. Scaling a treatment system that handles urine requires navigating health-safety regulations, securing reliable supply chains for components, and convincing end-users of the product’s safety and efficacy. Co-founder Dyllon Randall said the win comes at exactly the right moment as the team moves towards its first commercial urine-to-fertiliser plant.
In the short term, the GreenPitch accolade is likely to raise Pee-Cycling’s profile among investors with an interest in climate technology. In the longer term, if the startup can move from prototype to commercial deployment, it could create a new revenue stream for farms and reduce the load on municipal wastewater treatment plants.
Why recovering nutrients from waste is a business and not only a good idea
The appeal of a circular fertiliser product is easy to state in environmental terms and easy to underrate in industrial ones. Nitrogen fertiliser is manufactured by fixing nitrogen from the air in a process that runs at high temperature and pressure and consumes a great deal of energy, which is why fertiliser prices track energy prices closely and why a country importing both feels the effect twice. Recovering nitrogen that has already been fixed, from a stream that is currently a disposal cost, sidesteps that energy bill entirely.
The same logic explains the municipal interest. A wastewater treatment plant is sized for the nutrient load it has to remove, and nutrients that never enter the sewer do not have to be treated at the other end. A technology that reduces the load is therefore worth something to a utility as an avoided cost, separately from whatever the fertiliser itself sells for.
The distance between a pitch win and a product
A competition win is a useful signal and a poor predictor on its own. What it demonstrates is that the idea survives explanation to a room of informed strangers, which is genuinely hard and genuinely worth something. What it does not demonstrate is that the process works at a hundred times the volume, that the output meets an agricultural standard consistently, or that a farmer will buy it twice.
Those are the questions a pilot answers and a pitch cannot, and they are why the gap between winning a prize and holding a purchase order is usually measured in years. For founders watching from the same sector, the useful reading of an award is as a door opened rather than a milestone passed.
