The Story of Membrion: From Beef Jerky Packets to Revolutionary Water Treatment
Sometimes breakthrough innovation comes from unexpected places. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Greg Newbloom shared how Membrion’s journey began with a completely different mission than where they landed – and how a common food preservative sparked a revolution in industrial water treatment.
The Unexpected Beginning
“We were initially focused on a battery technology,” Greg revealed. “It’s called flow batteries… designed to store in a grid scale quantities of energy.” These batteries had enormous potential for renewable energy storage, but they faced a critical limitation: their membranes couldn’t handle the extreme environments inside the batteries.
The team needed materials that could withstand conditions so harsh that, as Greg described, “if you were touch the liquids, they would burn and melt your hand away right there.” Their search for a solution led them to an unlikely inspiration: “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.”
The Five-Year Journey to Market
Turning this insight into a viable product wasn’t a sprint – it was a marathon. “If you looked at the history of Membrion, we’re just about to turn eight years old, really, the first five, six years of the company were figuring out how to go from something that was the size of a thumbnail up to something that you could actually treat multiple gallons of water at the same time,” Greg explained.
This long development cycle required both patience and the right kind of investors. The company stayed lean, working with angel investors who had technical backgrounds and could understand the potential breakthrough. As Greg noted, they supplemented this with “federal government funding, state funding, things like that, to really get us to the point where we could say… we’re actually now out here selling this.”
The Pivot to Water Treatment
While developing their technology, Membrion discovered their ceramic membranes had applications far beyond batteries. They found their way into industrial wastewater treatment, particularly in the semiconductor industry where existing solutions were both expensive and environmentally problematic.
Greg explained the status quo: “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.” This process costs “multiple dollars per gallon” and creates significant environmental and liability risks – “single spill is tens of millions in liability, not to mention the bad PR from poisoning a community with toxic waste water.”
Building for the Future
Looking ahead, Membrion is evolving from a technology provider to a complete solution provider. “What we’re realizing, what we’re getting pulled towards with our customers, is this concept of being able to provide a complete solution to some of these problems that right now we’re a critical step in solving,” Greg shared.
Their vision extends beyond just treating wastewater. Greg explains they want to “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 to that process.”
This approach could transform how industries handle waste, moving from an expensive disposal problem to a valuable resource recovery opportunity. As Greg puts it, “There’s a lot of things that are wasted that don’t need to be wasted, and they can be recovered quite economically when compared to having to mine for additional fresh water or mine for additional metals and minerals.”
Membrion’s story shows how breakthrough innovation often comes from unexpected places, and how being open to pivot can lead to even bigger opportunities than originally imagined. From beef jerky packets to revolutionizing industrial water treatment, it’s a reminder that transformative solutions can come from the most unlikely inspirations.