Andrew Walker
Chief Commercial Officer at Evove
Chief Commercial Officer of Evove, the UK membrane company pulling lithium from water; a 30-year water-marketing and commercial strategist.
Compiled by Antoine Walter - from insight gathered on and off his (don't) Waste Water microphone!
Andrew Walker is the Chief Commercial Officer of Evove, the UK company turning graphene-oxide membranes into a way to pull lithium out of water. A 30-year water and energy marketing strategist who came up through Siemens and his own firm Blue Gold Marketing, he is the commercial force behind Evove's asset-light push that, in 2025, won a strategic investment from Japan's Kurita. (As of June 2026.)
Andrew Walker runs the commercial side of Evove, the British membrane company whose graphene-oxide coatings and 3D-printed spacers are now being used to extract lithium from brine. He joined in 2021 as Chief Marketing Officer and stepped up to Chief Commercial Officer in 2024, owning partnerships, business development and the go-to-market for a technology that treats lithium extraction as a water problem rather than a mining one.
Walker came to water through marketing, not the lab. He spent fourteen years at Siemens from 1993, including its water-technologies business, then led communications for the International Water Association and founded his own water-marketing firm, Blue Gold Marketing, in 2007. Along the way he helped set up the International Water Summit in Abu Dhabi and served on the European Commission's water-innovation partnership, which is a long way of saying he has spent three decades learning how to sell deep water tech to a cautious industry.
At Evove, that experience shows up as a deliberately asset-light strategy. Rather than buy a lithium deposit the way most direct-lithium-extraction rivals do, Walker's team licenses the membranes and partners with the asset owners, a model that helped a company that has raised under US$13 million land Japan's Kurita Water Industries as its largest shareholder in 2025. The full story of that bet is in how Evove won Kurita with an asset-light DLE play.
“We go about it from a water treatment mindset, not from a mining mindset.”
For someone who has spent three decades selling water technology to a cautious industry, lithium might be the easiest pitch of his career.
On (don’t) Waste Water
Andrew Walker on the (don't) Waste Water podcast:
The company
Frequently asked
- Who is Andrew Walker?
- Andrew Walker is the Chief Commercial Officer of Evove, a UK membrane-technology company. A marketing and commercial strategist with roots at Siemens and his own firm Blue Gold Marketing, he has worked in the water sector since the 1990s and now leads Evove's partnerships and go-to-market for direct lithium extraction.
- What does Andrew Walker do at Evove?
- As Chief Commercial Officer, Walker owns Evove's commercial strategy: partnerships, business development, offtake and licensing deals, and the brand. He joined as Chief Marketing Officer in 2021 and became CCO in 2024, steering the company's asset-light, partner-led route to commercialising its membranes.
- What is Evove?
- Evove is a UK company that makes graphene-oxide-coated reverse-osmosis and nanofiltration membranes plus 3D-printed spacers. It applies them to desalination, industrial wastewater and direct lithium extraction, where its membranes strip out divalent ions to yield a cleaner lithium intermediate.
- What is Evove's deal with Kurita?
- In October 2025, Japan's Kurita Water Industries became Evove's largest shareholder and took exclusive global rights to its direct-lithium-extraction technology, alongside a three-way commercial partnership with Northern Lithium targeting UK lithium production from 2027.
- How is Evove's approach to lithium different?
- Evove treats lithium extraction as a water-treatment problem, not a mining one. Instead of buying its own lithium deposit like many rivals, it licenses its membranes and partners with asset owners, an asset-light model Walker argues is more modular, capital-efficient and scalable.