Mo Alkhadra spent years of his life figuring out how to remove troublesome materials like toxic lead and radioactive waste from water. But as he progressed along his doctorate studies at MIT, he realized that if he wanted to bring his technology to market, he’d need to do something other than build a better Brita. “We ended up talking to large corporates that had interest in that domain,” Alkhadra told TechCrunch.
But, he added, “I had been warned to some extent by investors and other stakeholders in the industry that it would be a very challenging space to pursue from a business standpoint.” So instead, Alkhadra changed his focus. Rather than trying to deliver clean water and discard undesired contaminants, he’d recover valuable minerals locked in water from reservoirs deep underground.
Alkhadra’s startup, Lithios , is starting with lithium, a critical mineral that’s in high demand as the automotive industry transitions to electric vehicles. Today, most lithium is either mined or captured by evaporating briny water on vast salt flats, most of which are in Andean South America. But extracting lithium in those ways is expensive, slow, and geographically limited.
In response, a fresh crop of startups is trying to meet the booming demand for lithium, particularly lithium that can be mined from sustainable sources . In addition to Lithios, companies like Lilac Solutions and EnergyX are all rushing to become the go-to lithium source for automakers and battery manuf.