Reverse osmosis has run on essentially the same membrane for more than forty years, and it isn’t because nobody built a better one. Nala Membranes did. It’s a sulfonated polysulfone film that shrugs off chlorine where today’s polyamide membranes come apart, and that one property kills the biofouling that quietly eats about a quarter of a desalination plant’s operating cost. A major membrane manufacturer’s engineers looked at the chemistry, liked it, and their business side said no. So the question I actually wanted to answer isn’t whether the technology works, because it does. It’s whether a company that has raised $15.15 million, roughly a sixth of what ZwitterCo banked, can get a genuinely new material adopted in a market with three or four serious players that hasn’t changed its core material in two generations.

And I’m going somewhere with this, because the honest answer runs through the least glamorous corner of the water business and past at least one fresh grave.

What did Nala Membranes actually invent?

Nala Membranes is a North Carolina startup built on polymer-chemistry work from Virginia Tech and the University of Texas at Austin, co-founded by CEO Sue Mecham and Dr. Judy Riffle, and what it has made is the first new reverse osmosis membrane material in over forty years: a sulfonated polysulfone thin film composite.

Let me unpack that, because “thin film composite” (TFC) is doing a lot of work. Every modern RO membrane is a sandwich, and the slice that actually rejects the salt is a wafer-thin polymer layer laid on top of a support. Since the late 1970s that layer has been a polyamide, and polyamide has two well-known weaknesses: its surface is rough, so gunk sticks to it, and chlorine tears it apart, so you can’t use the cheapest, most obvious tool in water treatment to keep it clean. Before polyamide, the industry ran on cellulose acetate, which was smooth and could tolerate a bit of chlorine, but it lost the flux-and-rejection race and got displaced. Nala’s pitch is that it brought both of those old virtues back, with a new material and a new way of making it.

The smooth surface is the part chemists get excited about, because it comes from the manufacturing process, not from a coating you add on afterward. Nala makes its polymer first and then lays it down, where polyamide is grown in place on the membrane in a reaction that leaves behind a rough finish and a couple of nasty waste streams. Same trick the cellulose acetate people had, brought forward to a modern high-performance film.

The chlorine advantage, and the 24% it targets

Here’s the money question, because a chemistry curiosity only becomes an investable company when it changes a number on an operator’s spreadsheet, and for RO that number is biofouling. Biofouling is just bacteria setting up house on the membrane, and the standard, boring, cheap way to stop bacteria in water is chlorine. Polyamide can’t take it, so operators fight fouling with pre-treatment, downtime, and expensive cleaning cycles instead. Nala can take it, down at drinking-water doses to keep bugs from growing, and all the way up to 10,000 ppm of hypochlorite when a membrane is genuinely filthy.

There’s an old rule of thumb in this industry that if you’re not at least 20% better than the incumbent, you don’t get a seat at the table. Sue’s answer clears that bar, and she is careful to source it rather than round it up:

That’s an operating-cost story, which matters, because in most industrial water deals the argument long ago stopped being about the sticker price of the membrane and became about what it costs you to run the thing over its life. A membrane you can chlorine-clean instead of babysit is worth more every single year, not just on day one.

Why did the membrane giants pass on it?

This is the part that gives the episode its title, and it’s more instructive than the usual founder war story. Around 2010 and 2011, before Nala even existed, the underlying sulfonated polysulfone chemistry landed on the desk of one of the big membrane manufacturers. Their technical people ran tests and liked what they saw.

Now, my instinct when I hear “the giant turned it down” is to reach for the hall of fame of corporate blindness, and the episode does exactly that: Kodak sitting on the digital camera its own engineer built, Blockbuster waving Netflix through, Xerox letting personal computing walk out the door. The trouble is that this is survivor bias dressed up as destiny. Internet Explorer held nearly 96% of the browser market in the early 2000s while being nobody’s favorite browser. Betamax was better than VHS and lost anyway. We still type on QWERTY keyboards that were designed to slow us down. Incumbency is a moat, not an accident, and the academic read is that you need to reach somewhere between 15% and 30% market penetration before adoption becomes self-sustaining. Sue puts the same wall in plainer terms: on the membrane side, she says, people can’t even fathom what you mean by a new membrane, because it’s been so long since they had one. I’ve argued this at length in a newsletter on why your water tech is probably not as disruptive as your pitch deck claims, and if that debate is your kind of fun, my newsletter is where I keep having it.

Has anyone ever actually disrupted water tech?

Yes, but you can almost count the clean examples on one hand, and every one of them took a decade or three. These are the cases I keep reaching for on the show. Trojan started in 1977 as three people in Canada betting that ultraviolet light could replace chlorine for disinfection, and most of the industry laughed until UV became mainstream municipal practice in the 2000s. The pressure exchanger, the device that recovers up to 60% of the energy in a desalination plant, arrived in 1992 and didn’t become standard until the mid-2010s, by which point something like 70 million people were drinking water that had passed through one. And the canonical case is Andrew Benedek pushing the membrane bioreactor through the 1980s and 1990s while everyone told him membranes had no place in wastewater, right up until GE bought Zenon in 2006 and the idea became obvious.

So the material working is the easy part. The pattern in this sector is that a better mousetrap wins a niche first and the mainstream last, if ever. Even today, polymer membranes hold about 93% of the market against roughly 7% for ceramics, a 2025 Global Water Intelligence split I chewed over in my newsletter, and that gap has barely moved despite ceramics being genuinely excellent. Membranes, it turns out, don’t much like a winner-take-all story.

How does Nala’s $15 million stack up against the field?

This is where I get to plug in my own numbers, because I keep a section of my Leviathan database on exactly this cohort, the startups trying to move the membrane itself, and laid side by side they tell a story the pitch decks don’t.

Look at what most of that money is actually buying. ZwitterCo, which has raised close to six times what Nala has, puts a clever zwitterionic layer on top of a polyamide. Aqua Membranes, whose 3D-printed spacers I covered with Craig Beckman, improves the plumbing around the membrane. Evove, which I looked at through its lithium work, coats and prints. Nearly the whole field is innovating around the polyamide rather than replacing it, which is the rational thing to do, because replacing the material is the hardest possible version of this game. The one team that took a swing as deep as Nala’s, Aquaporin, built biomimetic membranes out of actual water-channel proteins, raised nearly $25 million doing it, and is now dead. That’s the company Nala keeps, and it’s worth sitting with before you get too excited about a founder claiming to have out-chemistried an entire industry on $15 million.

Can a bootstrapped startup out-patient the oligopoly?

I think the interesting answer is that Nala isn’t trying to beat the giants at all, and that’s precisely why it might work. Run it through the framework I use for this: a water tech can be disruptive on four fronts, creating a market, improving performance, cutting costs, or improving the user experience, and the earlier you are, the fewer of those you’re allowed to touch at once. Nala touches exactly two. It improves performance, by handling organics and chlorine that choke polyamide, and it cuts costs, by that 24%. Two, which is the ceiling I’d give a company this young. It is not also trying to invent a new market or reinvent how plants are operated, and that discipline shows up in the fundraising.

The go-to-market matches the money. Nala is starting in industrial wastewater, the semiconductor, textile, and mining streams that are loaded with the organics polyamide hates, where a customer feels the pain sharply enough to try something new, and where you don’t need to dislodge a giant to win the job. Manufacturing is deliberately asset-light: Nala makes its own polymer, coats a sourced substrate, and hands the sheet to a contractor to roll into modules, with, as Sue points out, no waste streams to dispose of at the end. It’s a company built to survive the twenty-year adoption clock rather than to sprint at it. There’s an exit shimmering somewhere out there too, and I’ll admit I floated the idea on the show that a private-equity-owned membrane major might one day want Nala as the premium “sparkle” on a commodity product, though that one is my speculation, not a plan on anyone’s desk.

Frequently asked questions

What is Nala Membranes?

A North Carolina startup, co-founded by CEO Sue Mecham and Dr. Judy Riffle, that has developed the first new reverse osmosis membrane material in over 40 years, a sulfonated polysulfone thin film composite.

What is a sulfonated polysulfone membrane?

A reverse osmosis membrane whose salt-rejecting layer is made from sulfonated polysulfone rather than the industry-standard polyamide. It has a smoother, more chlorine-tolerant surface, which reduces biofouling and allows aggressive chlorine cleaning.

Is Nala’s membrane really chlorine-tolerant?

Yes. Nala reports tolerance from drinking-water-level doses up to 10,000 ppm of sodium hypochlorite for cleaning, where standard polyamide membranes degrade on contact with chlorine.

How much has Nala Membranes raised?

About $15.15 million across five disclosed rounds, according to the Leviathan funding database, with a further roughly $5 million priced round open at the time of the interview.

How is Nala different from ZwitterCo or Aqua Membranes?

ZwitterCo coats a zwitterionic layer onto polyamide and Aqua Membranes prints spacers around existing membranes; both improve the incumbent. Nala replaces the separating material itself.

The one thing I’d watch

If you want to know whether this is the rare water-tech disruption that sticks, don’t watch the chemistry, which already works, and don’t watch the funding headline. Watch for two things: real, paid industrial-wastewater installations that survive a full cleaning season, and a strategic lead investor writing the check that says a serious player wants this material to exist. Get those, and the twenty-year clock starts running in Nala’s favor. As Sue puts it, the whole point is to make reverse osmosis cheaper and simpler so it can do what it’s supposed to do, and that’s a fight worth losing sleep over. The full conversation, chlorine chemistry and all, is the episode.

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I keep a list of every company trying to pull lithium out of water instead of rock, and right now it runs to about forty names. The money on that list is overwhelmingly American and overwhelmingly large: Lilac Solutions has raised north of $300 million, EnergyX more than $130 million, and both spent it the conventional way, buying their own lithium sites to prove the technology on. Evove, the British outfit whose pilot I drove out to a muddy County Durham field to see this spring, has raised under $13 million in seven years and owns no lithium asset at all. It’s also the one that, in October 2025, convinced Japan’s Kurita Water Industries to take exclusive global rights to its technology and become its largest shareholder. So here’s the question worth your time: how does the company that raised the least, and owns nothing, get validated first?

Full disclosure before I answer it: I’ve been kicking the tires on Evove for years, since my own LeckerLithium experiments and an earlier conversation with the company, and I bumped into Andrew Walker, their CCO, in Amsterdam, where he invited me up to Newcastle to see the pilot for myself. So I went and stood in the field. But the reason I think this is worth an article rather than just an episode is what the numbers around Evove say once you line them up against everyone else chasing the same prize, which is a view you only get if you’ve been tracking the whole field.

Who’s actually winning the money race in lithium-from-water?

Almost nobody you’d expect. When I sort my direct-lithium-extraction list by capital raised, the top of the table is a wall of American cheques: Lilac Solutions at over $318 million, Energy Exploration Technologies (you’ll know them as EnergyX) at $134 million, then Canada’s Summit Nanotech near $90 million and Mangrove at $85 million. Evove sits a long way down that column at $12.95 million across five rounds since 2018, which puts a British company with one of the most-watched DLE pilots in the world eleventh on my list by money raised.

Two things jump out of that table once you sit with it. The first is a quiet naming pattern: a striking number of these companies started life as water businesses and rebranded toward the shinier word. Mangrove Water Technologies became Mangrove Lithium. Evove itself used to be G2O Water Technologies. The water people worked out, before the market did, that brine treatment and lithium extraction are close to the same job. The second is that Britain has quietly grown a whole DLE cluster, because alongside Evove my list carries Seloxium, CleanTech Lithium, WaterCycle Technologies and Salinity Solutions, none of them household names, all working the same seam (I’ve profiled one of them, how Salinity Solutions halves the energy of squeezing water out of any stream).

So why did the smallest serious player win Kurita?

Because Evove made a different bet with its money, and the bet is the story. Look again at the companies above it on the funding table and you’ll notice most of them did the same thing with the cash: they bought a lithium asset, a deposit or a site of their own, so they’d have somewhere to prove the technology and, eventually, a resource to sell (it’s how Standard Lithium and Adionics have played it). Walker is blunt that Evove deliberately refused to play it that way.

Buying a deposit is what turns a $13 million company into a $300 million one, because resources are expensive and slow. Evove stayed a technology licensor instead, selling its membranes and coatings and even its 3D-printing know-how to whoever is building the plant, and partnering with an asset owner (Northern Lithium) rather than becoming one. That’s the difference between a mining mindset and a water one, and it’s the whole reason a small balance sheet could get this far.

I’ll admit this is catnip for me, because I’ve been arguing a version of it across my whole lithium series, from the evaporation ponds of Salta to the DLE startups you trip over walking through Vancouver: strip away the mystique and direct lithium extraction is a water-treatment plant that happens to output something worth $15,000 a tonne, which is the whole case I’ve made for water technology in lithium.

Does the technology actually deliver?

This is where the muddy field earns its place, because an asset-light story collapses the moment the technology underperforms on someone else’s site. Between January and April 2025, Evove ran a 1:15-scale demonstration plant with Northern Lithium at Ludwell Farm in County Durham, on real brine pumped from under the North Pennines, and the published results held up: up to 92% end-to-end lithium recovery, an intermediate at 96.5% purity, and calcium and magnesium pushed below the 5-parts-per-million line where the instruments stop finding them (Evove, “DELiVERED,” October 2025).

The 96.5% is the number that matters, and here’s why, because it’s easy to skate past a purity figure. Walker reckons the intermediate most DLE outfits publish lands around 80 to 82% pure. Evove came out of this pilot at 96.5%, and that gap is money rather than bragging, because the closer your intermediate starts to battery grade, the less you spend dragging it the rest of the way. One of Evove’s conversion partners put real figures on it: starting from the cleaner Evove stream cut their downstream conversion cost by roughly 25% on capex and 22% on opex.

How it gets there is the divalent removal up front, stripping the calcium and magnesium out with its nanofiltration membranes before the lithium ever goes for polishing, and that same cleanliness is what lets Evove recycle its water and regenerate its own acids and bases on site, the basis of its zero-water and zero-chemical-footprint claims. One number you may have seen needs a quick correction, though: the 99.1% that’s been attached to this story is the selectivity of Evove’s Separonics membrane on a hexadecane rejection test, not a lithium-purity figure. The membrane is extraordinarily selective, the lithium results are the 92% and the 96.5%, and conflating the two is exactly the kind of thing that makes an investor distrust the rest of your deck. I’d add my usual asterisk to “zero footprint” too, since it’s always more site-specific than a pitch slide admits, but as DLE goes this is the cleanest version I’ve looked at.

What did Kurita actually buy?

Not a stake, a chokehold. In October 2025 Kurita Water Industries completed an investment that made it Evove’s largest shareholder and, more tellingly, handed it exclusive global rights to use Evove’s DLE technology (Kurita Water Industries, October 2025). In the same announcement, Northern Lithium, Kurita and Evove committed to a three-way plan for commercial UK lithium starting end of 2027, at 500 tonnes a year and ramping past 20,000 tonnes a year by 2035 (PRNewswire, October 2025). So the modular plants get built and manufactured by one of the largest water-treatment companies on earth, while Evove keeps being the technology inside them. For an asset-light licensor, that’s the dream customer, and it’s not the only Japanese name circling: Walker also described an offtake-and-project-finance tie with a trading house he could only call a $100-billion-turnover company.

What I’d flag for an investor is the pattern, not the single deal. The serious money entering DLE from the water side is strategic, not venture, with Kurita buying into Evove and Veolia already running DLE membranes at Centenario in Argentina. The water majors have decided lithium is their adjacency, and they’re shopping for the technology rather than building it, which is precisely the exit a company like Evove is built to be.

What could still go wrong?

Plenty, and I’d be selling you the pitch deck if I skipped it. Asset-light cuts both ways: leaning on Northern Lithium and Kurita gets Evove to scale cheaply, but Evove no longer fully controls its own destiny, and Walker himself calls the partner route “a lot more risky.” Manufacturing is the other open question, because he’s refreshingly candid that churning out these 3D-printed ceramic modules at volume is still unproven, and he’s watched additive manufacturing over-promise before. And the capital math hasn’t gone away just because Kurita showed up: water-tech venture money is thin, hardware is unforgiving, and one large strategic backer is not the same as a deep market of investors. Hold the 92% and the 96.5% in one hand and those three in the other.

Why this matters now

Because the supply chain is the whole game. China spent two decades building a near-monopoly on lithium-processing technology and in 2025 began enforcing export curbs on exactly that know-how, which is what turns a working extraction line in a Durham field from a science fair into a strategic asset. Evove’s answer to the obvious objection, that a scattered Western industry can’t catch up, is counter-intuitive and the reason I keep thinking about it.

Three years from now, if Northern Lithium’s commercial plant comes online as planned, it won’t look like a mine. It’ll look like a water-treatment facility that happens to produce one of the most valuable materials on earth, which is either a quietly radical idea or the most obvious one going, depending on whether you came up through mining or through water. You can probably guess which side of that field I was standing on.

The full conversation with Andrew Walker, plus the walk around the Northern Lithium site, is in the episode embedded above. And I dug into the wider water-meets-lithium thesis across my newsletter, if you want the map the rest of this sits on.

Frequently asked questions

What is direct lithium extraction (DLE)?

A family of processes that pull lithium straight out of brine with membranes, sorbents or ion exchange, instead of evaporating brine in ponds for months or mining hard rock. It’s faster and uses far less land and water, which is why the water-treatment industry has moved into it.

What is Evove?

A UK company, formerly G2O Water Technologies, that makes graphene-oxide-coated reverse-osmosis and nanofiltration membranes plus 3D-printed membrane spacers, and applies them to direct lithium extraction and industrial water treatment. Its advanced filtration line is branded Separonics, commercial launch planned for 2026.

What did Evove’s Northern Lithium pilot achieve?

At the County Durham demonstration in early 2025: up to 92% end-to-end lithium recovery, 96.5% purity for the intermediate lithium chloride and sulfate, divalent ions (calcium, magnesium) below 5 parts per million, across more than 300 hours and 78 million data points.

How much has Evove raised, and who backs it?

About $12.95 million across five rounds since 2018, including a $6.9 million Series A in 2023 led by At One Ventures. In October 2025 Kurita Water Industries became its largest shareholder and took exclusive global rights to its DLE technology.

How does Evove compare to other DLE companies?

By capital raised it’s far smaller than leaders like Lilac Solutions (over $300M) or EnergyX (over $130M); it sits about eleventh on my list of forty. Its differentiator is the asset-light model: it licenses technology and partners with asset owners rather than buying lithium deposits of its own.

Is Evove’s lithium battery-grade?

The pilot produced a high-purity 96.5% intermediate; battery-grade lithium carbonate needs 99.5% or above, reached in a downstream conversion step. Evove has separately made around 2 kg of battery-grade lithium carbonate above 99.5% purity at its own test centre.

Who is Andrew Walker?

Evove’s CCO, or Chief Commercial Officer. He came into water from additive manufacturing, which is where the company’s 3D-printing expertise originates.

Sources

1. Evove, “DELiVERED: onsite demo DLE plant for Northern Lithium,” 2025. evove.tech/dle-onsite-demo (retrieved 30 June 2026).
2. Kurita Water Industries, “Kurita Advances Strategic Alliance with Evove Ltd.,” 15 October 2025. kurita-water.com.
3. Northern Lithium / PR Newswire, “Northern Lithium announces partnership with Kurita and Evove,” 15 October 2025. prnewswire.co.uk.
4. (don’t) Waste Water, S13E5 with Andrew Walker, Evove. youtube.com.

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