Lithios Raises $8.5M Seed Round to Scale Electrochemical Lithium Extraction

Today we're announcing that Lithios has raised $8.5 million in seed funding led by Lowercarbon Capital, with participation from strategic investors across the battery materials and energy sectors. This funding marks a critical milestone in our mission to build domestic lithium supply from unconventional resources — and to do it without the environmental footprint of traditional extraction methods.

Lithios was founded on a simple but powerful observation: the United States is sitting on enormous quantities of lithium-bearing brines — in geothermal wells, oil and gas produced water, and underground saline aquifers — that existing extraction technology can't economically recover. Evaporation ponds don't work at low lithium concentrations. Conventional chemical precipitation is too slow and too wasteful. The lithium stays in the ground while the US continues to import the overwhelming majority of its battery-grade lithium from overseas.

We built Lithios to change that. Our electrochemical extraction platform selectively captures lithium ions from dilute brines at speeds and efficiencies that make previously uneconomic resources viable.

The Problem We're Solving

The energy transition runs on lithium. Every electric vehicle battery, every grid-scale storage system, every consumer electronics device depends on lithium-ion chemistry. Global demand for battery-grade lithium is projected to grow 5-10x by 2035 as EV adoption accelerates and grid storage builds out.

The supply picture is stark. Today, approximately 60% of the world's lithium production comes from the "Lithium Triangle" — Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia — using evaporation pond technology that takes 12-18 months per extraction cycle and consumes enormous quantities of water in some of the world's driest ecosystems. Another 25% comes from hard-rock spodumene mining in Australia, which requires energy-intensive processing and generates significant mining waste.

Meanwhile, the United States has identified domestic lithium resources in California's Salton Sea geothermal field, in oil and gas produced water streams across the Permian Basin and Appalachian region, and in deep saline aquifers across multiple states. These resources are real — but they exist in dilute brine form that traditional extraction can't address economically.

Our Technology: Electrochemical Lithium Extraction

Lithios has developed an electrochemical extraction platform that works fundamentally differently from conventional approaches. Rather than using evaporation or chemical precipitation to concentrate and recover lithium, we use electrochemistry: selectively applying voltage to drive lithium ions across ion-exchange membranes and into a concentrated recovery stream.

The core advantages of our approach:

• Speed: Our process completes in hours, not months. Evaporation ponds require 12-18 months per cycle; our platform processes brine continuously.
• Water efficiency: We return the depleted brine to its source with minimal water loss — critical for operation in water-stressed regions.
• Low concentration viability: Our platform recovers lithium economically from brines as dilute as 50 mg/L — well below the minimum concentration for viable evaporation pond operation.
• Purity: Our electrochemical separation produces high-purity lithium chloride or lithium hydroxide directly, reducing downstream processing requirements.
• Modularity: Our systems are modular and scalable, suitable for deployment at existing geothermal wells and oil field sites without major infrastructure investment.

Why Lowercarbon Capital

We couldn't be more aligned with Lowercarbon's mission. Lowercarbon invests in technologies that meaningfully reduce carbon emissions — and domestic lithium extraction from low-impact resources is exactly that. By enabling US battery supply chains to use domestically extracted lithium from geothermal and produced water sources, we reduce the carbon footprint of mining, shipping, and processing that characterizes imported lithium supply chains.

"Lithios is solving one of the hardest problems in the energy transition: making domestic lithium supply economically and environmentally viable," said a partner at Lowercarbon Capital. "Mohammad and his team have the technical depth and the operational experience to turn this into a real commercial platform. We're proud to back them."

The Team

I founded Lithios with a team that spans electrochemistry, membrane science, process engineering, and energy industry operations. My own background is in electrochemical engineering, with prior work on ion-selective membrane systems for water treatment and battery applications. Our team also includes veterans of geothermal energy operations, oil field services, and battery materials processing — the precise combination needed to take a lab-scale electrochemical innovation to field deployment.

We are based in Houston, TX — deliberately. Houston is the center of gravity for the oil and gas produced water opportunity, home to some of the world's most sophisticated process engineering talent, and increasingly a hub for the energy transition technologies that will define the next generation of the energy industry.

What's Next

This seed round will fund three priorities:

1. Pilot deployment at the Salton Sea: We are partnering with a geothermal operator at the Salton Sea to deploy our first field-scale pilot system. The Salton Sea geothermal field is estimated to contain enough lithium to supply a significant fraction of US EV battery demand — our pilot will demonstrate economic extraction at field conditions.
2. Produced water program: We are initiating a produced water lithium recovery program with two Permian Basin operators. Produced water volumes in the Permian exceed 20 million barrels per day — even at low lithium concentrations, the recoverable volume is substantial.
3. Team expansion: We are hiring across process engineering, field operations, and business development. If you want to work on the hardest and most important problem in battery supply chains, reach out.

The energy transition needs domestic lithium. We're building the technology to provide it — cleanly, quickly, and at scale.