Chris Wyres

Chris Wyres did not invent the membrane, and he is the first to say so. He came into water sideways, after roughly twenty years in advanced materials and digital printing, including a stint as CEO of the laser-coding company DataLase, which he led through to an exit. Some friends were building a graphene-oxide coating business called G2O Water Technologies, knew his background in coatings and inks, and asked him onto the board for advice. He gave it, got more and more involved, and in April 2020 took the CEO seat full-time, with water as the one corner of his tech portfolio (urban air mobility was another) that genuinely fascinated him. His framing for why: there is no green without blue, and once you see the role water plays in climate change, membranes sit at the heart of almost every way we clean it.

Chris Wyres then made the decision that defines the company. G2O had been coating other people's membranes with graphene oxide to make them better, and that worked, but Wyres took a hard look and concluded it could only go so far, because the underlying membrane was still the problem. A standard membrane, in his description, is a piece of polymer or ceramic with randomly sized, randomly distributed holes, many of which are dead ends that go nowhere. So the company decided to stop improving other people's parts and start making its own, using 3D printing to engineer every pore, the pore size and the three-dimensional structure beneath it. That shift was big enough to need a new name, and G2O became Evove.

Chris Wyres can point at three numbers to explain why that matters, and they are the ones that named his (don't) Waste Water episode. By 3D-printing the spacers inside a reverse-osmosis module, Evove removes the dead zones where fouling and pressure drop quietly eat energy, which it says cuts the energy used in desalination by around 30%. In food and beverage processing the same idea cuts energy by up to 80% while lifting throughput four to five times. And by coating membranes to control which ions slip through, Evove says it can double the selectivity for separating lithium from the calcium, magnesium and sodium it is tangled up with in a brine, which is the hard, unsolved bit of getting battery-grade lithium out of the ground.

Chris Wyres has steered Evove squarely at the energy transition, where the company now expects most of its near-term work, with roughly 70% of the next five years pointed at lithium and the rest spread across desalination, food and beverage, and an early but growing green-hydrogen market that needs ultra-pure water to feed its electrolysers. The technology has pulled in real conviction money: Evove raised a roughly $6.9 million round in 2023 (about £5.7 million) led by the climate-focused impact fund At One Ventures, part of about $13 million raised to date, with the cash going into scaling up the 3D-printing and membrane manufacturing rather than more lab work.

Chris Wyres is also refreshingly blunt about the headwind, which is the rest of the water sector. Asked what he had learned the hard way, he did not reach for a slogan:

“One thing I've learned the hard way since being involved in the water sector: the pace is incredibly slow. The pace of adoption of technology is slow, and the funding of the water sector is woefully low. It's changing, thankfully, the specialist funds are emerging, but it needs to accelerate.”

That is the tension Wyres is betting on. He is selling a step-change in how a membrane is built into an industry famous for moving slowly, and his answer is to chase the markets that cannot afford to wait, lithium and the energy transition, where the old membranes simply do not do the job well enough.