Via Separations

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SHREYA DAVE: My name is I today and the CEO and co-founder of Via Separations.

BRENT KELLER: I am Brent Keller. I'm the CTO and one of the other co-founders of Via Separations. We make chemical purification equipment that is very low cost, low energy consumption, modular, and electrified.

SHREYA DAVE: We use as much energy separating different chemical compounds from one another as we do in all the gasoline in all the cars and trucks in the United States every year. And there's a huge opportunity to change that. Because today, if you think of a pasta pot, what we do in the industrial sector is we boil off all the water to get at the pasta at the bottom of a pot, instead of pouring it through a strainer in your sink.

At the industrial scale, that is 50% of the capex, it is 90% less energy, and it's a more modular and therefore cost-effective process. So our technology allows us to transition from a thermal separation to a membrane based separation. And that's important for markets such as food and beverage, paper manufacturing, and chemical purification.

BRENT KELLER: We accomplish this using a really cool material called graphene oxide that's both produced from the same material you make pencil lead out of, as well as amenable to large-scale manufacturing. We produce a selective filter that's capable of operating at high temperatures and in the sort of challenging environments it takes to process chemicals, whether that's very high or very low pH, a strong solvent, or even an aggressive oxidizer, like a bleach or peroxide. So by building using this material that has incredible chemical robustness, we're able to produce molecularly selective filters that can meet the needs of the industry, as you were talking about.

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BRENT KELLER: So this technology was originally her PhD thesis in Jeff Grossman's lab at MIT. And around the time she was wrapping up, they had done some really excellent work looking at the impact that this sort of memory could have on the seawater desalination industry and actually concluded that it was a little over-engineered for that application. And I read a paper in Nature about the breadth of chemical separations that could benefit from improved processing. And we kind of all had a eureka moment that we should really leverage the chemical durability of the membrane to go after other applications that don't yet benefit from low-cost chemical processing.

SHREYA DAVE: Yeah, we use-- we actually boil off chemicals about 10 times as much as we filter water today. And so the ability to go from what was a thermal separation into a membrane or filtration-based separation has a lot of economic and energy potential.

BRENT KELLER: Yeah, so what's really unique about this technology is the chemical durability with the ability to select between different molecules. So there's never been a material before capable of doing this type of separation. Traditional materials are very good for processing seawater or wastewater at relatively low temperatures. So while a lot of excellent engineering has been done that we can translate into the chemical environment from those applications, what's truly unique is the ability to process these chemicals.

SHREYA DAVE: And there's been a lot of research and a lot of development in graphene and other graphene-based products. The material we use, graphene oxide, is a derivative of graphite, but it has-- sort of a cousin to graphene. But nobody has scaled up or developed a product commercially using graphene. We had someone say to us yesterday, I'm still waiting for the first commercial application of graphene. And that's what we're able to do.

So we are making the largest areas. We are processing in the most scalable methods. And we've developed a product that has commercial potential using graphene, the miracle material.

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SHREYA DAVE: So Brent and I did our PhDs in Jeff Grossman's lab here at MIT. Jeff Grossman is a Material Science professor who focuses, actually, on computational material design. And we were his first two experimental students, and started doing experimental material design. So the three of us co-founded this company in the end of 2016, and have since grown that to include a rockstar team of chemists, chemical engineers, and other manufacturing-related scientists.

So today we're 12 people. We love working with co-ops from the Northeastern Co-op Program and other schools, as well. And we're a very technical and focused team. So we have done a lot of our business learning on the fly and continue to learn from a lot of advisors and mentors along the way.

So a customer for us uses about 40,000 square feet of membrane material that's packaged up into things that fit into pressure vessels. But it's a very large area. And if you have pinholes or defects that are letting everything through, it's not a very effective filtration material. So we focused a lot on scale-up.

We've developed some processes that allow us to kind of transition from a bench process over to our roll to roll process. We started at the very beginning using manufacturing methods that were all already established. We're inventing a new material. We don't also need to invent the manufacturing process, so we're trying to de-risk there.

And for us so far, we've done about a 6,000 times area scale-up since leaving the lab at MIT. So that gets us to the first commercial size module, right around now. We've left the lab three years ago now, so there is a couple orders of magnitude left to go. But we see the path to getting there for full-scale systems.

BRENT KELLER: Yeah, it's also been extremely important to us to not just stick to materials that are low cost and compatible with these processing methods, but also to integrate into our customer infrastructure in a way that plugs in place with what they would be used to.

SHREYA DAVE: Sure. So it is July of 2019 right now. In July of 2016, Brent defended his PhD.

BRENT KELLER: You had just done yours a little bit before that.

SHREYA DAVE: I had just defended my PhD. And we were just starting to think about the opportunities of this membrane in the chemical purification separation world to kind of outside of water. We started by going to talk to customers and spent that summer really getting deep into a bunch of different markets.

A year later in July of 2017, we signed our first term sheet for our first fundraising deal, so we were able to raise a little bit of private money. The Engine is our lead investor, which is the venture fund that MIT cornerstoned and actually made possible and created. And then 12 months later, 12 months ago, we actually outgrew The Engine space and moved over to Greentown Labs, where we were able to scale up our production and our team, as well. So we don't know what what's in store for us this year. But by next year, we'll be hopefully putting a pilot in the field.

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SHREYA DAVE: So we really like the food and beverage industry as a place to start because we see that as the fastest path to revenue. Companies like ours have a long lifecycle between development, scale up, and ultimately selling product. And getting there sooner obviously has a lot of benefit both to us and the proving the technology, but also to our investors.

So in food and beverage, they're using membranes in a number of different processes but are often limited by the ability to clean them. And so the chemical durability of our technology means you can clean them more aggressively, clean them faster, reduce downtime, and improve the product, the actual physical purification of the product all at the same time.

There are a ton of other applications that we can also scale up towards that save energy. For example, in the paper industry, we spend about $2 billion a year evaporating boiling water off of a part of the process and being able to improve the energy efficiency of that as well. But those tend to be longer-term markets because of time to adoption and complexity of the process.

In terms of partners, we are always looking for folks who are excited about changing their manufacturing process. So there needs to be an openness to discussing the economics, and the physical requirements of that process, and also the desire to scale that up. So ideal pilot partners for us are ones who need to see it happen at a small scale but also have the economic need to see it happen on a much larger scale.

Looking ahead, we're looking for partnerships, long-term partnerships with chemical companies and chemical manufacturers to identify where we can help them the best. So we've developed a set of analytical tools that allow us to say, OK, here's your process. Here is where we come in. And this is the [INAUDIBLE] system. This is a design of the system that can help you the most and the fastest. So we're always looking for folks who are willing to dig into their applications and dig into the technical side of things as well as understand the economics.

BRENT KELLER: Yeah, and a lot of our expertise there is not just in producing the material but understanding how it would impact a potential customer's process. As a whole, we're really thinking holistically, starting from what does their dream separation look like, and what infrastructure they already have in place already, and translating that into the solution that would best serve them.

SHREYA DAVE: We're in the business of augmenting our customer's infrastructure, not necessarily replacing it.

BRENT KELLER: So we're super excited to start working closely with companies, integrating into their systems in the field. And it's been really exciting building the team and seeing the incredible progress they've been able to accomplish in both scaling up the technology as well as integrating and productizing, so we're really excited to find-- excited to be industry-ready and proving out the technology in the field.

SHREYA DAVE: For us, "industry-ready" means being able to operate in the field for extended periods of time in the unfriendly operating conditions of our potential customers. And so as we get to that point, we're looking for those partners, which makes it the perfect time for us to be part of STEX25, and finding those partners, and identifying the folks who are open to innovation, who are excited and are committed to making a change within their organization.

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BRENT KELLER: It's incredibly fulfilling and challenging to try to take something that's been proven possible at the lab scale and really work through all the details you have to get right and all the challenges that come up as we scale up. So it's been really exciting to both of us as first-time founders and first time doing this sort of thing, and we've really benefited a lot from both a phenomenal team, as well as some excellent advisors and support.

SHREYA DAVE: It's been way more fun than I thought it would be to start my own company. I think this is-- by the definition of my dream job. And I have the opportunity to solve things that I didn't know were challenges I would have to solve. I like to say that every three months, my job has a complete 180 turnover in terms of what I do and what's hard or what's new.

And as soon as I've started to figure something out, it's like, all right, we've done that. Now we know how to do that. What's the next thing? And so it keeps it interesting. It means we're always learning. And as Brent said, we have been really fortunate to have a team of phenomenal scientists and folks on our team, but also advisors and mentors and guidance along the way.

BRENT KELLER: Yeah, absolutely.

SHREYA DAVE: I think that there's a little bit of an impedance mismatch between startups and large companies normally. And that's something that ILP and other organizations are trying to solve, innovation organizations within those large companies as well. We move on a-- week by week, decisions change, and we might be moving. And one of our biggest criteria for hiring people is ability to handle shifting priorities, and large companies that are working more on a quarterly or predictable time schedule.

But that's actually really good for us. I think we have a lot to learn from large companies. We have a lot to benefit from their distribution channels and their existing policies and practices, and also from their history of product development. And so I think there's a lot of really awesome opportunities to work together and for us to be the innovation arm for some of these larger companies.

BRENT KELLER: Academic groups, small companies, and large companies all have really important roles to play in exploring new ideas, getting those ideas scaled up and in the market, and of course, implementing them at really large scale. And I think a lot of what's benefited us about-- a lot of great organizations in the MIT ecosystem and abroad is, it takes a lot of dialogue to really understand both the benefits and solutions each of those groups has, as well as what their challenges and opportunities are.

And keeping those active dialogues with, for us, potential customers, as well as research going on in the broader communities, is really important to making sure that we've found the right solution to a problem.

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SHREYA DAVE: I think-- I think that innovation is a difficult word to define, and everyone has their own definition of it. For us, I think it's doing something that nobody's ever done before and doing something good with that, making an impact. I don't think either of us are motivated by doing something just because it hasn't been done before. But we are motivated by changing the world doing something nobody's done before.

BRENT KELLER: Yeah, innovation can range from unique ideas and policy proposals, to taking a proof-of-concept technology and actually thinking through and executing on all the details it takes to find the right fit for that product or to actually get it into market, to being receptive and excited about implementing something new into your system and being willing to work from that end of the spectrum as well. So it really comes in a lot of forms and kind of takes a village.

MIT's been a huge part of our company history, not only the initial research in the laboratory here with Jeff, but also the support of the TLO in translating that research. The support of the external organization that MIT helped start, The Engine, giving us access to some of our first lab space.

SHREYA DAVE: The support of Industrial Liaison Program that has brought us folks that we have continued to work with over the past few years. And then also just the entrepreneurship community has been a really valuable resource that allows us to talk to folks who started companies before, practice our first pitches with professors who've started companies before, identify organizations that like to fund this type of technology. It's been a really, really important kind of confluence of like-minded folks.

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