Only 2% of VC-backed founders ever ring the IPO bell. Michael Oster belongs to the 2% – he took a battery storage company to NASDAQ. Now he’s betting the same playbook can fix the 70-year-old technology gap standing between the world and usable water.
Four billion people now live somewhere water-stressed for at least part of the year. One in four cities already faces water insecurity. This is not a shortage of water – the earth has plenty of seawater as evidenced by our rising oceans. It is a shortage of pure water usable for crops, drinking, and even for industry, visible in our depleting ground water aquifers. And according to the World Economic Forum, global freshwater demand is on track to outstrip supply by 40% before the end of this decade – a gap that leaves an estimated 1.6 billion people without safely managed drinking water and a scary proportion of farmland that loses productivity or use at all. This isn’t a future problem. It’s a present-tense infrastructure deficit, and it’s getting worse every year.
Reverse osmosis (RO) – the technology the world leans on for water scarcity – has barely changed since the 1950s. Seventy years and billions of dollars have made the membranes better, but not the economics: high-pressure pumps, heavy electricity demand, capital costs that only pencil out for drinking water in wealthy countries.
Push RO toward agriculture, industrial water, or highly saline brine, and the math that works for a city’s tap water falls apart. The global desalination market is still set to roughly double by the early 2030s – proof the demand is there. It just can’t all be met by the technology currently serving it.
So why is Michael Oster – who took Eos Energy Enterprises from inception to NASDAQ, and whose team built Convergent Energy and Power into a $1 billion-plus energy asset business – choosing to spend his next chapter on water, instead of staying in the energy storage market he already knows how to win?
What does a battery storage entrepreneur see in desalination that the incumbents don’t?
“The link is chemistry,” Oster says. “At Eos, chemistry changed what was possible in storage. At Ionic, we believe our chemistry can change what is possible in desalination – especially for applications like agriculture and industrial water, where conventional approaches are too expensive or energy-intensive. And I’ve seen what it takes to move from chemistry in the lab to infrastructure deployed at scale.”
Ionic’s bet is a working fluid, invented by CTO and co-founder George Adamson, that behaves like a liquid sponge. The company is targeting the huge swathe of agricultural and industrial water use that RO has always priced itself out of. A commercial-scale pilot is going in later this year in Almería, Spain, one of the most water-stressed agricultural regions in Europe.
We asked Michael to walk us through why RO hit a ceiling, what Ionic’s chemistry actually does differently, and what happens to the world’s water problem if this works at scale.
♻️ Ionic Desalination
Sector: Water & Desalination | Clean Energy | Agriculture HQ: United States Round: Seed 3.5€M ($4M) Traction: $6M+ raised from HNWIs and strategic partners including a major citrus grower; University of Tennessee validated, commercial pilots launching 2026.
Opportunity: Ionic’s membrane-based desalination system extracts freshwater from saline sources using low-grade heat or solar, at 25% of the cost of reverse osmosis. First commercial pilots launching 2026 across agriculture, brine management, and mine de-watering.
👉 View Ionic’s investment opportunity, to connect with the founders just get in touch, or email them directly on Climate Marketplace.
Water is a very different bet from energy storage. What made you look at desalination and decide this was where you needed to go next?
It is important to build something meaningful for the world: we like multi-hundred-billion-dollar industries where the legacy technologies have not evolved to match the critical nature and scale of the problem. Energy storage was certainly one, and water desalination is another one clearly.
This solution is also rooted in chemistry, which is our core competence. Our partner/co-founder George Adamson thinks about things in a unique way, and when he had some novel and compelling ideas about water a little over a half dozen years ago, I always find his enthusiasm to be exciting.
Your CTO George Adamson holds a PhD in chemistry from MIT and invented the Eos zinc/saltwater battery technology. what was the scientific insight that made you believe you could unlock something RO never could?
We start by deeply understanding the problem and its limiting factors – if water is the issue, energy is often the constraint. You can’t assume someone else will supply all the energy you need. But Mother Nature has fewer limitations: thermal energy is abundant (more so in hot summers, exactly when water demand is highest in scarce regions), even though electrical energy is constrained and used elsewhere during those times. The wise move is to sync the type and amount of energy used with what’s naturally already available.
From there, we look to history – what smart people already figured out that’s newly relevant given today’s bigger problem and modern materials science. Older working fluids absorbed less than 10% of their weight and needed a larger temperature swing to move from absorption to desorption. George’s working fluid absorbs 400%, with a fraction of that temperature differential – turning liquid extraction (once too expensive to be viable) into something far cheaper than RO is today.
What did you get wrong early on – an assumption about the technology, the market, or the customer – that cost you time and forced you to rethink?
That’s an interesting question which gets at the heart of our invention philosophy… Edison famously expressed, and I’m paraphrasing: I have not failed a thousand times. I have successfully found 1,000 ways that won’t work. In other words, it’s a process and it can only be successful if you take risks, which means you cannot avoid mistakes. Rather you should embrace and learn from them.
Our variation on Edison’s philosophy is that it is necessary to fail – just fail quickly and cheaply, and learn from it. We fail at things every day, but one breakthrough can create far more value than a thousand quick and cheap failures would cost.
There is another element that we consider that I have learned from George. Scientists often don’t understand truly and fully why things don’t work. The cause might seem obvious which then shifts the risk-averse inventor to a safer direction; but dive deeper and you often find a different problem and therefore a whole new solution set.
If Ionic works – really works, at scale – what changes in the world?
At large enough scale, water could cease to be a limiting factor in the process of human flourishing. Water is a big problem for many people at least part of the year. You will see statistics that billions of people already suffer from water scarcity for several months every year.
In parallel crops also suffer from water scarcity and diminished water quality, so we will have difficulty feeding our population. It is happening today in regions that may not be as visible to many of us and it is also happening in developed countries where economic realities do not allow the use of water in all regions.
The earth is not suffering from a shortage of water – what we have is a shortage of usable water. We have depleting aquifers while we have rising seas, which means that more of our water has blended with seawater and is now saline.
Imagine if we can use nearly all water locally to drink and grow crops with a safe system using only solar thermal heat at utility or industrial scale at a fraction of the cost of alternatives. That is the picture that we see.
How do you get from lab numbers to a system a Spanish farmer is actually willing to sign a 15-to-35-year water purchase agreement with?
Our special fluid acts like a liquid sponge: it soaks up pure water from saltwater when cool, then releases it when warmed slightly – using only small amounts of low-grade ambient heat. Since the fluid separates naturally from water once warm, it can be reused continuously.
We’ve proven the breakthroughs in the lab – absorption performance, independent salt-rejection validation – but lab results don’t get farmers to sign long-term water deals. Field proof does: quality, reliability, safety, economics. That’s why our Almería deployment matters.
We’re moving from chemistry to system engineering, with partners on board for manufacturing and finance, and expect to demonstrate real-world performance by late this year with our first commercial-scale system in Spain, in a region that knows water stress firsthand.
Why do you offer Water-as-a-Service, and what makes the business model work right now?
Most clients already treat water as an operating cost, so we meet them there instead of asking them to buy a new, unproven asset. With no upfront capital cost, there’s less risk for the client, more upside for us, and a clear incentive for us to keep the system running well over its whole life.
Why launch in Spain’s agricultural water market?
Spain is one of the world’s largest agricultural markets, producing about a quarter of Europe’s high-value fruit and veg, with a climate for multiple harvests a year. The problem is usable water is scarce and getting pricier. We can supply it far cheaper than current costs while still earning strong returns for investors.
Spain also has the institutional financing to support assets like ours at scale, and regulators and clients there already understand desalinated water. It’s our first market, but the model is built to go global from here.
What’s the critical path to your scale-up vision, and the biggest risk?
Once we demonstrate the first system in the field – its performance, manufacturing cost, a resulting real order book – we’ll have shown the model scales. We’ve already proven the technology at smaller scale, so the remaining risk is engineering for volume manufacturing. That just needs strong partners, not new invention.
Picking the right partners and aligning incentives is key to growing fast and profitably as a young company. We’re not trying to be everything to everyone – our core business is pulling water out of salt water. The same chemistry applies whether we’re turning brackish groundwater into irrigation water or concentrating hyper-saline brine that RO can’t handle, so it works for industrial users too.
What do investors consistently misunderstand about Ionic – the objection or misframing you have to correct before the real conversation can start?
Investors often default to thinking of desalination for drinking water and don’t understand the scale of agricultural or industrial water consumption. They also tend to benchmark against reverse osmosis on all specifications when many applications do not need the same kind of water specs as drinking water. The real conversation starts when investors understand that
Ionic is not trying to replace RO everywhere for every use case; we are targeting the applications where our technology provides the client with what is needed at a fraction of the cost.
What is your actual investable thesis in three sentences – the version that makes the right investor lean in?
Ionic is applying a proven chemistry-commercialization playbook to one of the world’s largest infrastructure bottlenecks: affordable, usable water.
Reverse osmosis will remain a critical technology, but its economics and energy profile leave huge gaps in agriculture and industrial water – which represent 70% and 20% of the earth’s water use respectively.
Ionic’s technology fills that gap by using ample and available low-grade heat such as solar thermal, to produce fit-for-purpose water at lower cost and with much lower electricity use.
Why has capital been so slow to back genuinely new desalination technology, and what’s changing?
Capital – institutional, conglomerate, even venture – is risk-averse and craves scale, preferring technologies already proven in the field.
That leaves the earliest, riskiest stages to individuals and startups, and it’s rare to find a team experienced enough to take a technology from concept to scale, let alone one willing to bridge those early stages with its own resources.
You’ve taken a battery chemistry company from inception to a NASDAQ listing. what is the one lesson that you’re applying most deliberately to building Ionic?
In the early stages of a deep tech company, the biggest risk is capital raising risk. The main lesson is not to grow beyond your capacity to fund until you have the right financial and strategic partners.
You need to be ambitious about the mission but disciplined about burn, milestones, and when to scale the organization. Advancing at each stage removes a set of risks and takes the company closer to deploying at scale which liberates capital access.
You know what it takes to go from a lab bench to a listed company. Does that make starting again easier, or does knowing exactly how hard it gets make it harder?
It makes it much easier! The other big risk is partner risk – among one’s management team, investors and strategic partners. Our team has worked together for 10-20 years and we trust each other completely. Our investors have succeeded with us before, in some cases multiple times. And our partners are receptive and excited with our technologies.
They trust our integrity and ability. Importantly, they trust our stability to push through the tough weeks and months during the thousands of failures, which is the only way you get to the big successes.
What do you think most deep-tech founders underestimate about the gap between a validated lab result and a commercially deployable system, and what does it actually take to close it?
Founders often expect capital to sprint in after a proof of concept – but it only comes once you’ve pushed further than most investors’ risk tolerance allows, so spend your scarce resources like a poor founder in a garage. Just know that this scrappy instinct can become too automatic, so recognizing when to step back and elevate the next generation of management is a test most managers never face.
Rapid-fire
Mantra or line you come back to when it gets hard?
Fail quick and fail cheap, and we will only be mad if you blame someone else. If today has been a tough day, go home and push the reset button – tomorrow must be better. If it is not, lather/rinse/repeat.
One daily habit or ritual that keeps you sharp?
Balance is key. Exercise. Spend time with friends. Be outside as much as you can. An exhausted mind cannot be as objective or creative.
Who are your role models?
It is the people who do the right things for the right reasons. I am more impressed by a committed youth coach or a kind police officer than I am by a billionaire.
Do you have a favourite quote or motto?
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas Edison
