Innovative cannabis extraction with Niccolo Aieta Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Spherex. Niccolo is the founder and CTO of Spherex, an innovative cannabis extraction company based in Denver, Colorado. He is a chemical engineer and received his Ph.D. at the Colorado School of Mines researching hydrogen fuel cell technology. After founding Spherex in 2015, Niccolo grew the company as an industrial-scale CO2 cannabis refinement operator built on two founding principles: efficiency and scale. When Spherex entered the market place, the highest efficiency using supercritical CO2 was roughly 50%.