The following interview is a conversation we had with Greg Newbloom, CEO and Founder of Membrion, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $23M Raised to Build the Future of Industrial Wastewater Treatment Solutions
Greg Newbloom
Absolutely great to be here.
Brett
Super excited for our conversation. I’d love to just begin with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Greg Newbloom
Yes, you already deemed my name, but I’m Greg Newbloom. I’m Founder and CEO of Membrion, and we basically are commercializing a ceramic desalination membrane that goes into really tough to treat industrial wastewaters, helping to produce clean water and valuable metals and materials as a byproduct of what we do. My background, I’m an engineer by training, but been doing the entrepreneur thing since I was a kid. And so this is really for memory on is really a way to combine that love of solving problems and the practical sides of being able to bring some technology into that. But at the end of the day, it’s how you be bringing customers and they keep them coming back. So, yeah, that’s me.
Brett
It’s been a long time now, but probably ten years ago, I had the luxury or a cool experience, I should say, to go do a tour of desalination plant in, I think it’s Carlsbad or.
Greg Newbloom
Oh, yeah.
Brett
Is that one of the biggest ones in the US?
Greg Newbloom
One of the biggest, absolutely. Yep. Very well known.
Brett
That’s fascinating technology. How many of those are there in the US?
Greg Newbloom
Yeah, there’s a few dozen that are in the US. Not as necessarily as big and lots that are around the world. It’s kind of one of those technologies that really came under the scene 40 years ago. But I think it’s increasingly becoming challenging to get them implemented as people are kind of considering the full environmental impacts of putting a new technology out there.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. Let’s dive deep now into the company and the founding story and the history. So it looks like you launched in early 2016. Take us back to those early days, what prompted this idea? What was this idea that made you say, yep, that’s it. Going to go build a company?
Greg Newbloom
Yeah. So, actually, we’re trying to solve a completely different problem initially. So were initially focused on a battery technology. It’s called flow batteries. You most likely haven’t heard of it, but it’s basically designed to store in a grid scale quantities of energy. You pair it with a solar cell or something like that, and it helps store energy for later. And these batteries are really effective, but they aren’t widely commercialized, in large part because of the membranes that they use. And the membranes just have to operate in these really extreme environments. Think things that, like, if you were touch the liquids, they would burn and melt your hand away right there. Things that we don’t normally encounter. And so were trying to develop a new membrane to help accelerate this new battery technology into the market.
Greg Newbloom
And we’re trying to think of, like, what materials can withstand these, like, super extreme environments. And we basically came back to ceramic materials, which are really well known for their durability, but they don’t have the right capabilities. And so were trying to think of, how could we create a ceramic filter that could just transport ions for this battery? And were really inspired by kind of the core of the invention came from the silica gel desiccant packs you find in the bottom of a beet jerky package. That’s what actually, we make our membrane of that material. And that was really the kind of core inspiration we eventually found our way into doing these kind of industrial wastewater treatments. There’s a whole story there, but, yeah, initially, we’re trying to solve a problem in a completely different market.
Greg Newbloom
It turns out that the problems that exist with being able to handle extreme environments are just really widespread. And were just kind of scratching the surface with the initial application. We’re focused on.
Brett
Where do you even begin when it comes to commercializing technology like this?
Greg Newbloom
Yeah, I think a lot of it is. It’s trying to get. One of the hardest things that we have is we could talk about all the unique things that the technology could do, but at the end of the day, people actually want to try it. Right. And it’s one of those things that’s complicated about bringing advanced material into that kind of minimum viable product, is that if you think about a water treatment, either your water is clean or you’re not. 90% is not good enough. 99% is not good enough.
Greg Newbloom
Like, you’re either there or you’re not so getting to a minimum viable product, so much of it is, can we make it at a physical size that’s relevant and make it in the quantity that’s relevant that you can actually do something with, and that 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. And that process. Yeah, took half a decade to figure out how to do.
Greg Newbloom
Now that we’re there, now we’re the fun part where we’re really, like, getting it out in front of customers and getting to see commercial deployments and stuff like that for a long time, just to get to that minimum product that could enter the market.
Brett
That’s a long time.
Greg Newbloom
How did. Yeah.
Brett
How do you stay so patient and how did you find investors that could be so patient? That’s a long journey.
Greg Newbloom
It is. It is a long journey. Yeah. I mean, I think for us, it really did come back to that mission. It was. We stayed really lean for a long time. You know, 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. So we had a good investor base, largely as angel investors, because they have the ability to be more patient than a lot of 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.
Greg Newbloom
So, yeah, getting the right people around the table and then supplementing a lot of what we did with federal government funding, state funding, things like that, to really get us to the point where we could say where we did our last round, were able to say, yeah, were actually now out here selling this, we can start to show some of the demand for the product. And thats when we started to bring in more fed traditional venture capital.
Brett
And just so we can visualize here, what’s a customer look like who buys this type of solution?
Greg Newbloom
Yeah, so, I mean, one of the main markets that we work in is the semiconductor industry. And so right now, we’re working with most large semiconductor companies globally, somewhere between either fully deploying our commercial solution or evaluating it for different sites. They generate pure. If you’re making chips, semiconductor, microelectronic chips, you’re intrinsically going to generate some really nasty industrial wastewater that contains heavy metals, contains a lot of other toxic compounds, and you’ve got to treat that before it comes back out of your facility. And so those are the types of things that we’re able to come in and do something really different than what’s done today.
Brett
And is your promise that it’s cheaper, is it better, or is it a combination of both?
Greg Newbloom
It’s both. Just to give you the status quo on a lot of the projects that we work with. 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. And they’ll boil that water, they’ll add a bunch of chemicals to it, they’ll combine it with cement and send it to a landfill. Those are the kind of base ways of dealing with some of these really complex wastewaters. And so you can imagine that it’s very expensive, often multiple dollars per gallon, to dispose of this. And they’re generating thousands of gallons a day in some cases for these wastewaters. And so it gets very expensive.
Greg Newbloom
But in a lot of cases, a lot of these companies are trying to do things more sustainably. And trucking wastewater around where you’ve got single spill is tens of millions in liability, not to mention the bad pr from poisoning a community with toxic bowel wastewater. Companies are looking for alternatives that just don’t exist. And so that’s really where we’re able to offer a different option than what’s been the status quo for the last 50 years.
Brett
From a marketing perspective. What’s the approach to marketing now? What does that look like? What’s the marketing philosophy?
Greg Newbloom
Yeah. So for us, the big thing that we deal with a lot is just helping customers to get over some of the common kind of risks and objections that come with adopting new technologies. The big thing that none of these fabs can handle is none of them are willing to, that their production on a startup company. So they make sure they’re making a lot of money every single day. So reliability is key. If you don’t have decades of experience, figuring out where you can fit is really critical. So we often work in really high impact, but non critical parts of the process. And so that’s allowed us to move a lot faster than if were working in more critical parts of the field. But we also do a lot of kind of marketing under water treatment.
Greg Newbloom
As a service, we’re basically finance the hardware for the facility, and that allows them to not have to fit within capital budget cycles. They pay only for the performance of the system as we generate it, and so it really aligns with their ability to be able to move quick in a low risk environment. No one’s going to lose their job if they’re only having to adopt it if it’s successful. And so I think for us, that’s been a key to our success and be able to move quickly.
Brett
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Brett
I see that you started off as CTO, and then in, I think it was, what, 2019 or 2020, you moved over into the CEO role. What was that transition like for you? What did you learn throughout that transition?
Greg Newbloom
Yeah, so I think that when I first founded the company back in 2016, I was all by myself. And I think one of the things I knew earlier is I wanted to bring people around me that had more experience and they could really help make company successful. And I think within that, I did a PhD in capital engineering. What I knew was engineering technology, and I figured that’s really where I can make the biggest impact on the company, to make them successful. Brought on a CEO, brought on a Coo. We were a great team for a while. The CEO ultimately ended up wanting to kind of return to an existing industry that he was in. And so we’re kind of left in a position of what’s next.
Greg Newbloom
And I think it was something that it felt right for me to be able to step into that CEO role. I always had a propensity for building teams, for being able to storytell. And I think a lot of it was just really, for me, a lack of confidence and being able to believe that I could pick up the other clinical skills that were required to be CEO. And so I thankfully had some really great mentors that were super helpful and getting up to speed and helping push me in those early years as CEO of the company. And I’m getting to a point where it’s still, like, a lot firmer sledding under my feet.
Brett
What have you learned about commercializing technology? And the reason I ask is, obviously there’s just a lot of amazing technology out there that just fails to ever get pushed out into the market and get adopted into the market, and it just stays there as technology. That could have been something amazing, but it never was. What have you learned about commercializing technology?
Greg Newbloom
Yeah, so I think a big component is for us, especially in deep tech. I feel like the go to market strategy in the business model is as critical, if not more critical, than the actual technology itself. I think there’s just so, especially with advanced materials, there’s so many different angles and factors to consider. Even if someone adopts you have to be able to meet their supply chain constraints, which are often way bigger than your capacity to produce these materials. And so finding a way, finding the right market to enter to start, that’s aligned properly with those risks and constraints, and being able to help customers successfully de risk.
Greg Newbloom
The technology has just been a really critical component, and I think that, as I can look at the companies who are peers to us and have done well, have made it through those gaps, thats a lot of what they figured out how to do. Ive watched a lot of companies with incredible technologies just bang their heads against the wall because there was just one objection after another. And instead of thinking a bit more holistically about go to market strategy, they got hung up on a technical performance attribute or something like that. Theres a lot of different ways to solve a problem. One of the big questions we get is how long do your membranes last? And that’s a great question.
Greg Newbloom
If you’re a customer, you care about how long something’s going to last and how long have to, shall I have more money to replace it? But at the end of the day, we’re a new technology. We don’t actually know how long these things are going to last. At the end of the day, we can provide some estimates, but we’ve been making them for two and a half years. So we only have a limited view into that. So instead of getting into this technical discussion around like, well, we think they’re going to last this long, but they may only last this long. We just bundle it under a service agreement, say, hey, look, you just pay for successful water treated like when your water is treated, you pay us. Let us worry about how long it lasts.
Greg Newbloom
We’ll factor that into our economics when the reality is factors out a lot better for us because we get the advantage, but it lasts a lot longer.
Brett
Clay, that makes plenty of sense from a go to market perspective. What would you say has been the most important decision you’ve made to date?
Greg Newbloom
I think for us it’s really come down to focus. I think that we get pulled in a lot of different directions because our technology can do a lot of different things. And so I think one of the big things, especially over the last six months that we’ve been learning, is that if we focus on doing one or two things really well, we’ll get the opportunity to do the other hundred things. But we’ve got to pick those couple things that are really critical, that we can do uniquely well. And so I think that’s for us, from a go to market strategy, has been really critical, is kind of being able to tell the customer no or wait, and not necessarily going after everything that gets put in front of us, I think has been an important lesson for us.
Brett
How do you know if it’s something you should focus on or if you should deprioritize?
Greg Newbloom
I think that’s the million dollar question. Right? A lot of it does come back to. I think for us, it’s come back to if it aligns with our mission and our capabilities, that tends to be really well. One of the things that we identified early is that we’re going to do really well in any scenario where there’s a high dollar per gallon treatment cost, meaning that the existing whatever they’re using today is really expensive, we’re going to have a lot of bandwidth to be more economical, likely more sustainable in those areas. But those products tend to be small because price is ultimately correlated with volume. And so for us, a lot of the really interesting high revenue projects are actually much bigger. And we get a lot of those that come across our plate.
Greg Newbloom
And so say no to the larger, bigger ticket items, to say yes to ones that are smaller but a lot more valuable in the long run was one of those things that was not intuitive until we really started thinking about syncing up our ability to actually deliver on these projects, our ability to support the customers on the backend, our capabilities, both from a product and a company standpoint. And really putting all those things together, I think, is were able to really justify that decision.
Brett
Trey, as I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised 23 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Greg Newbloom
Yeah, I’ve learned a lot. It’s been my first time, remember, it was my first time going through the fundraising process. I’ve done it a couple of times now. But I think that the big thing that I learned is that investor expectations are very different than customer expectations or what they’re wanting us to build. And so I think a lot of the way that I tell the story has to change. For investors. It’s a different flavor of the same story, different focal point. And so I think that some of that is, were out raising funds, really having that our customers really care about the specific details and making sure that this is going to work and it’s going to be reliable. And those things really, they do matter. At the end of the day, that’s what makes us successful.
Greg Newbloom
But thats not necessarily what our investors are caring about. Theyre wanting to see the big vision and the opportunity and how big we could get without being distracted. And I think that being able to really balance that is something that took me a while to figure out how to tell the right story, the right audience.
Brett
Lets imagine that a deep tech Founder comes to you. Theyre early stage, and they say, Greg, based on everything youve learned, what advice would you have? What would be the number one piece of advice or just some general advice that youd have for them?
Greg Newbloom
I think that you are who you spend your time with. And so I think the single most important thing you can do is get some people who are smarter than you on your team. I think that’s really from embryon. That’s one of the things that made us successful. I have not hesitated to get people who I think are smarter than I am, even in the same field as me, let alone easy to be smarter than me outside of engineering technology. But some of the people that we have on our team are far smarter, even in the same field. I think it’s really elevated our capabilities, the speed that we can move. I think a firm believer at the end of the day, your progress is really going to be about your team and what they can execute on.
Greg Newbloom
And so I think that if you’re going to focus on anything as an early stage Founder, it’s getting those incredible people in the door as quickly as possible. And you’ve got to have the vision. You’ve got to have the ability to convince them all those things are going to matter, to get them across the finish line. But at the end of the day, you’re only going to be as capable as the people you have around you.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision here?
Greg Newbloom
Yeah, so I think that from embryon, really, we started as a technology focused company. We have this ceramic desalination memory and can do some really incredible things in the long run. 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. I mentioned that we help companies reduce the amount of volume that they truck. At the end of the day, they don’t want to truck any of this stuff off. They’d like to be able to treat it, but in fact, they’d like to be able to treat it in a way that what they produce is clean water and valuable metals.
Greg Newbloom
And so that’s one of the areas that we’re moving towards, is being able to provide this holistic solution where someone can come to us, we can 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. I think for us, it’s continuing to move closer to our customers and closer to, I think, the big problem that we’re solving, which is that there’s a lot of things that are wasted that don’t need to be wasted, and they can be covered quite economically when compared to having to mine for additional fresh water or mine for additional metals and minerals.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision, and I just have a lot of admiration for founders who tackle these types of hard problems and deep tech founders. So a lot of admiration for everything that you’re doing there. We are up on time, so we’ll have to wrap here before we do. If there’s any founders that are listening in and they want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?
Greg Newbloom
Yeah, I mean, I think the best place to follow along with us is on LinkedIn. We’re super active there, and you can see all the interesting projects that we’re working on.
Brett
Amazing. Greg, thanks so much for taking the time.
Greg Newbloom
Awesome. Thanks, Brett.
Brett
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