Membrion’s Pivot Playbook: How a Failed Battery Tech Startup Found Product-Market Fit in Industrial Wastewater

Most startup pivots happen when the original idea fails. But in a recent Category Visionaries episode, Membrion’s story reveals a different pattern: sometimes the biggest opportunities emerge when solving a problem in your original market creates a solution for an even bigger one.

The Original Mission

“We were initially focused on a battery technology,” Greg Newbloom explained. “It’s called flow batteries… designed to store in a grid scale quantities of energy.” The problem wasn’t that flow batteries didn’t work – they did. But they couldn’t be commercialized because their membranes couldn’t handle the extreme conditions inside the batteries.

The conditions were brutal: environments so harsh that, as Greg described, “if you were touch the liquids, they would burn and melt your hand away right there.” This led to a search for materials that could withstand these conditions, ultimately leading to an unexpected breakthrough.

The Accidental Innovation

The solution came from an unlikely source: “The silica gel desiccant packs you find in the bottom of a beef jerky package. That’s what actually, we make our membrane of that material,” Greg revealed. But this discovery would prove valuable far beyond their original market.

Recognizing the Bigger Opportunity

Rather than staying focused solely on batteries, the team realized their breakthrough had broader applications. “It turns out that the problems that exist with being able to handle extreme environments are just really widespread. And we’re just kind of scratching the surface with the initial application,” Greg shared.

They discovered that semiconductor manufacturers faced a massive challenge with toxic wastewater treatment. The current solution was both expensive and environmentally risky: “These waters are so complicated and so expensive to treat. It’s very common for a facility to simply load that wastewater onto a truck and drive it hundreds of miles to be disposed of elsewhere.”

Executing the Pivot While Maintaining Confidence

The key to successfully executing this pivot was maintaining investor confidence through the long development cycle. “We stayed really lean for a long time,” Greg explained. “Small team, a lot of capabilities, knew that we had to what milestones were trying to hit, and we just had to stay really focused.”

They built support through a combination of angel investors who understood the technical challenge and government funding. As Greg noted, they had “angel investors with strong technical engineering background. So they understood the problem after they understood that we could crack that nut, that there was something really special inside.”

From Technology to Solution

The pivot wasn’t just about entering a new market – it was about fundamentally rethinking their approach to commercialization. “I feel like the go to market strategy in the business model is as critical, if not more critical, than the actual technology itself,” Greg emphasized.

This led to an innovative service-based model where customers “pay only for the performance of the system as we generate it.” This approach eliminated multiple adoption barriers at once, accelerating their market penetration.

The Future Vision

Today, Membrion isn’t just treating wastewater – they’re reimagining the entire concept of industrial waste. Greg explains their vision: “take these kind of challenging wastewaters, concentrate what’s valuable in them, and be able to recover that value, return it back to a useful spot in the value chain, and produce clean water as a byproduct.”

For founders considering a pivot, Membrion’s journey offers crucial lessons: sometimes your breakthrough technology might be more valuable in markets you hadn’t originally considered. The key is remaining open to these possibilities while maintaining the focus and discipline needed to turn technical innovation into commercial success.