Greg Newbloom

Greg Newbloom did not set out to fix water. He grew up fascinated by aerospace, did stints at Boeing in Seattle and a lot of materials research, and earned a PhD in chemical engineering at the University of Washington, where he invented a new kind of membrane. As he tells it, water found him: the smart investors who joined early looked at what the material could do and told him he should be thinking about water, and his honest reaction was that he did not really know anything about it, so he started digging. That outsider start, coming into a field he describes as drinking from a fire hose, runs through everything Membrion has done since.

Greg Newbloom built Membrion around one technical idea: a ceramic ion-exchange membrane. Ion-exchange membranes are the working part of electrodialysis, a process that uses an electric field to pull dissolved salts and metals out of water, and until Membrion every one of them was made from polymers that are, in his words, very delicate, struggling under the oxidising conditions, extreme pH and high temperatures of real industrial streams. Making the membrane out of ceramic instead lets Membrion build it thin enough to be energy efficient and tough enough to survive the harsh streams that break polymers, and because ceramics foul less, the system needs less cleaning to keep running. It is the kind of materials bet I spend a lot of time mapping on the water-tech side of this work.

The wedge Greg Newbloom found is one of the most vivid things I have heard a founder say about this industry: he is in the business of displacing the trucks. He says the most shocking thing he learned coming into water was how routine it is to load contaminated wastewater onto a truck and drive it somewhere else, which he calls the antithesis of sustainability. Membrion does not try to eliminate that step so much as shrink it, treating the water on site so a factory trucks far less of it, and in his first pilot at one of the world's largest semiconductor makers he says the unit cut operating costs by about $1.6 million a year with a payback under two years. The bigger prize is the stuff dissolved in those streams, the copper, nickel and cobalt the clean-energy transition needs, which is why he frames Membrion's purpose as circularity of critical resources.

Greg Newbloom is candid about how hard the path has been, which is rare and worth listening to. Membrion's original plan was to sell membranes to companies that would build them into modules, but those buyers just wanted a cheaper version of what they already used, so the team felt the squeeze and pivoted to going straight to the end user, a focus that meant firing a valued early employee whose patents he says the company would not exist without. He talks openly about the particular fear of being wrong in water, because the industry moves so slowly that it can take a year just to learn whether a bet was right, and by then a startup that guessed wrong is out of money. His advice to younger founders is the line I keep coming back to: the bigger the vision, the easier the same hard work becomes, because no investor wants to bet on a small one.

“The bigger the vision, the easier it's going to be. No one wants to bet on a small vision. They want to bet on the thing that could change the world.”

Greg Newbloom is, in the end, a materials scientist who learned to sell a slow industry on a fast idea, and the $43 million behind Membrion (a figure I reconcile against my Leviathan database the same way I do every number in my methodology) suggests the market is starting to agree that recycling industrial water beats trucking it away.