Tim Naughton

Tim Naughton did not set out to build a water company. He came at it from fluid mechanics, and his journey started back in 2015 as a lab volunteer on a university project he was drawn to because it was being coupled with solar energy and taken to remote, water-scarce communities. The science behind it was batch reverse osmosis, a way of running a desalination membrane that Professor Philip Davies at the University of Birmingham had been refining for years, and the thing that pulled Tim out of the lab was the realisation that there was only so long you could keep improving a prototype before someone had to make it real. So in 2019 he took a place on Innovate UK's iCure programme, which exists to push university research into the marketplace, spent six months finding out who would actually pay for the technology, and came back with a grant and a business case. That business case became Salinity Solutions in 2021.

Tim Naughton's whole pitch rests on a deceptively simple shift. Reverse osmosis, or RO, is the workhorse of desalination, the process that pushes salty or dirty water through a membrane at high pressure to leave clean water on the other side, and it is used everywhere, but it is famously energy-hungry and it wastes a lot of water as brine. Most companies try to fix that by inventing a better membrane. Salinity does not. As Tim puts it, their innovation is a process innovation, it is how they recirculate the water around the membrane, and they will happily use any standard membrane you give them. By running the water in a batch that loops past the membrane while a piston slowly concentrates the salt, the system keeps the average pressure low instead of fighting it at every stage, and that is where the savings come from: he says it reaches 98% water recovery, cuts the leftover brine volume fifty-fold, and runs on roughly half the energy of conventional RO. It is the kind of water-technology rethink that sounds obvious only once someone has made it work.

Tim Naughton has been disciplined about where that technology goes first. Rather than chase every market, Salinity works in three buckets he describes clearly: mineral extraction, water reuse, and zero liquid discharge (ZLD), which is the industrial goal of sending almost no wastewater to drain. The proof points are concrete. At a site in Kent, one of the most water-stressed regions of the UK, the company fed five different water streams through its system and recovered 98% of the water in the field, leaving only 2% to discharge. On the mineral side, what began as a single lithium trial with Cornish Lithium in 2021 has, in his words, moved from playing with lithium in our backyard to the Lithium Triangle, the high-altitude salt flats of South America where most of the world's lithium brine sits, after the Chilean mining major SQM invested through its lithium-ventures arm and started working with Salinity inside its own processes.

Tim Naughton's approach has now been validated by the industry's own scorekeepers: in 2025, Salinity Solutions won the Global Water Award for Breakthrough Technology Company of the Year, the sector's headline prize, presented in Paris. What is striking is how unflashy the route there has been. He is adamant about only taking on jobs valuable enough that the customer fully funds the trial, which is slower than the spray-and-pray approach a lot of hardware startups take but keeps the cash forecast honest, and the company has reached this point on about $4.4 million raised, partly through two unusually large Crowdcube crowdfunding rounds that left it with more than 2,000 small shareholders. He is also candid about the cost of getting here, and that candour is the most human thing about him.

“Going out and raising money takes a lot of time and a lot of attention, and it's also stressful. We've had 4 funding rounds in the last 3 years, which means in the bank at one point in time we've had, what, 9 months cash at most. That's a big burden when you're employing really high-skilled people.”

Tim Naughton is, in the end, the rare deep-tech founder who treats frugality as a feature, not a constraint, which is most of why a process tweak dreamed up in a Birmingham lab is now concentrating lithium brine in the Atacama and recovering 98% of the water at a site in Kent.