Gabriel Toffani

Gabriel Toffani did not come to lithium the way most startup CEOs do. He spent 32 years inside Suez, the giant French water company, running operations and projects across Mexico, Brazil, the wider Latin American region and finally the United States, the kind of long industrial career that ends in a corner office and a pension. So when he joined a 20-person Paris startup called Adionics in 2022, at 65, it was not a man building a resume. As he put it on the show, he had nothing left to prove to anyone, and he wanted to have a lot of fun backing the energy transition.

Gabriel Toffani took over a company that had already made one big bet. Adionics started life trying to make drinking water from the sea, but desalination was a crowded business full of giants, so in 2017 the founders pointed the same idea at a different target: lithium, the metal every electric-car battery needs. Their tool is Flionex, a bespoke liquid designed in the Adionics labs that does what the industry calls Direct Lithium Extraction, or DLE, which means pulling lithium straight out of salty brine instead of leaving it to dry for months in giant evaporation ponds. What makes Flionex unusual is how picky it is: it grabs the lithium and leaves the boron, magnesium and potassium behind, which is why Adionics can promise a very pure, low-water, lower-cost output.

Gabriel Toffani’s whole pitch on the podcast was about standing out in a stampede. He counted more than 50 DLE companies racing for the same brines, so being merely good was not enough, you also had to be cheaper to build and cheaper to run. And here is the contrarian bit that I liked: when the lithium price crashed in 2024 and even big producers slowed down, Toffani argued that a downturn actually favours a low-cost technology like his, because expensive processes are the first to get cut. The proof he kept coming back to was SQM, the Chilean lithium major that both led the company’s funding and let Adionics run a 1,500-hour test at its Atacama salt flat, which is about as close to a real-world endorsement as a hardware startup gets.

Gabriel Toffani had real capital behind that confidence. Adionics has raised about $31.6 million in total, and the headline is the $27 million Series B it closed in late 2023, led by SQM. To put that in perspective, the company’s first proper round back in 2018 was $4.6 million, so the Series B was roughly six times bigger and came from a strategic backer that actually mines the brine, which for a deep-tech company is the difference between a polite cheque and a genuine vote of confidence. The money went where you would expect: a commercial team, more research to push Flionex into battery recycling and hard-rock lithium, and boots on the ground in the Lithium Triangle, with subsidiaries staffed partly by people Toffani knew from his Suez years.

Gabriel Toffani led Adionics until April 2025 and is now an independent entrepreneur, which makes this profile a snapshot of a particular and pivotal chapter rather than a running scoreboard. And my favourite detail says more about him than any cap table: at 65, he still runs marathons and competes in Ironman triathlons, which he describes, with the dry understatement of someone who has clearly done a lot of long days, as his tool to be okay every morning.

“The real future of the lithium production from brines is the DLE. That’s the future, not the evaporation pond.”

Gabriel Toffani is, in the end, a four-decade water operator who spent his last big act proving that the discipline of running treatment plants travels straight into the messy new world of battery metals.