Craig Beckman

Craig Beckman spent two decades selling the exact technology he is now trying to replace, which is what makes him an unusual founder to bet on. He came up through the membrane business the long way, starting at Osmonics in 1992, staying on through its sale to GE Water, then running MIOX as President and CEO before it was bought by Johnson Matthey. So when a tiny Albuquerque startup asked him to fix the one part of a reverse-osmosis element nobody had touched in sixty years, his first reaction was the same one the giants of the industry have: it is too hard, it will not work. As he puts it, "I probably had the same bias that a Toray or DuPont has." The founder, Rodney Harrington, changed his mind by showing him the data, and Craig Beckman became Aqua Membranes' CEO in 2017.

Craig Beckman likes to explain the whole company through a bag of oranges, and it is worth following the logic because it tells you what Aqua Membranes actually does. Reverse osmosis, the process that turns seawater or dirty water into clean water by pushing it through a membrane at high pressure, needs a plastic mesh between the membrane layers to keep water flowing across the surface. That mesh, Craig Beckman tells the story, was an accidental copy of the netting on a 1960s grocery-store orange bag, and almost seventy years later the industry still uses basically the same thing. Aqua Membranes prints a custom spacer pattern directly onto the membrane surface instead, which lets it tune the design for each customer and, crucially, cut the energy a reverse-osmosis system burns by up to 30%. Energy is most of the cost and most of the carbon in desalination, so a spacer that saves it is a real lever.

Craig Beckman sells it as a drop-in, which is the part that makes water-utility buyers actually move. There is a famous adoption problem in water, where a better technology sits unbought for years because no plant operator wants to gamble on a startup. Aqua Membranes sidesteps it by shipping the same standard 8-inch element everyone already uses, so a customer can swap it into an existing system in an afternoon and see the result by the end of the day. Craig Beckman describes running his elements head-to-head against a competitor's on a two-train system, "bring your best and show us what you can do," and measuring a 13% energy saving on day one. And if it does not work, he says, "we'll show up in an afternoon, you'll be back on the old product, no harm, no foul."

Craig Beckman is candid that the road was not smooth, which is the human part of the story. In 2018 the company launched a product called Arctic at WEFTEC, the industry's big annual conference, took orders, and then watched the printer it depended on fail its acceptance test, forcing a painful restart of the core printing technology. Those were "very difficult investor conversations," he admits, "as we'd taken some investor money by that time and missed revenue significantly." What carried them through is a quality he keeps coming back to: "I'm often motivated by the fact of people telling me it can't be done. I'm like, well, I disagree." That stubbornness now has proof behind it, with a seawater pilot running with Saudi Arabia's SWCC, the world's largest desalination operator, the 2024 Global Water Awards naming Aqua Membranes Breakthrough Technology Company of the Year, and backing from water-specialist investors including Pentair, Kurita, Micron and Burnt Island Ventures.

“We want to become the standard in spiral wound membrane elements. Today, the extruded mesh is the standard. We want to become the standard. Polyamide is now the standard chemistry, but it wasn't when Steve and I started 30 years ago.”

Craig Beckman is, in the end, the rare insider who spent thirty years learning exactly why the incumbents said this could not be done, and then decided to do it anyway, which is most of why a startup in New Mexico is now building a 200,000 sq ft factory in Knoxville to print its way into a 5-billion-dollar market.