Smarter Desalination with Arian Edalat, Founder & CEO @ Active Membranes

Today on the show we have Aryan Edelat. Aryan is a co-founder of a company called Active Membranes. They are built on a technology that enables operators to communicate with membranes in the water purification process. If you're not familiar with membranes as a concept or you have not been watching previous episodes, A, I

encourage you to watch other episodes. Cuz we've spoken to a number of people in this space. But as a concept very simply, membranes are a crucial piece of the infrastructure that allows us to access any type of portable water.

Aryan's bigger vision is that with this technology with the communication of the health of the membranes, it makes something like desalination, water purification so cost-effective that fresh water can be accessible to anyone anywhere on the planet. Very enjoyable conversation. I know you will enjoy as well. Shout out to our sponsors, Cleantech Group Lab. If

you're looking to grow in Cleantech, they are the people to do it with and the producers of this podcast, Craze and Friends. With that, I give you Aryan. Welcome to another episode of The Grove. Shout out to our sponsors mentioned just before we hit record. Without them, it would not be possible to interview

awesome people doing awesome things like Aryan. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Oh, yeah. Without without me going on about the different you know, the technology that you built and the reason why it's important with membranes, membrane fouling, the industry.

I'd like you to talk about that because I'm sure I will learn more about it when you say it than me. So, if you could just start with a quick introduction of yourself and what you built. Thanks. Yes, my name is Aryan Edelat. I'm by education PhD chemical engineer.

And I've spent the past 20 plus years of my life working on water desalination. Trying to make sure that um communities of um disadvantaged um people that have no access to fresh water um uh you know, gain a sustainable cost-effective way to be able to live because at the heart of everything at the heart of every geopolitical

problem, everything that we're facing today, if you look at it, it would be in one way or another, a society that has limited access to water. I'm not saying it's the mother of all evil, but it's one of the problems.

And um you know, and it's very important. And then and then another issue is that what I call water scarcity a silent existential problem. Right. There are wars, there are all sorts of matters of sins that you know, threaten us as human species.

But at the heart of it is is is is water because without it's one of the most essential things that we need. Without water, we don't cease we cease to exist as a species. And right now the world is going I don't want to lecture anyone, but I just want to give you a little bit of

statistics of how bad this is right now. We have 97% of what we call water resources on Earth are not portable. They're not drinkable. Leaves us with 3% of it. Out of that 3%, 2% is not accessible. Why? Because in the during the form of glaciers and permafrost and this kind of things.

So, everybody's fighting over than 1% of the entire global water supply. I wish there was a divine justice in how is that distributed in the world? It's not. You know, 30% of the world have about 70% of it.

That 30% of the world is overusing it. So, it leaves about 70% of the other world population without sustainable access in one way or another to fresh water. Terrible situation to be in. Had you had you always been in a headspace of wanting to tackle this issue or did something happen at some point? So, my

first job 22 years ago, I want to paint a picture for you. This was in a very arid, very hot area in the country of my birth, Iran. And I was a manager of a water desalination plant. My job was over the weekends to take water tankers to villages, to remote villages around that plant. And

when you used to go to these villages, these people had no access to fresh water. They had the cistern, this reservoir which was filled with you know, really bad quality of water. When you'd replace that with something fresh, their eyes would light up. They didn't have much, but they would invite you to the meal that they

had. Very kind and very gracious people. The look in those guys' eyes and the kids and whatever, that sealed the deal for me and I wanted to be a part of this um and I wanted to continue this. Now, switching back to technology um I want to paint you another picture. In the same location, I'm 28.

It's 50° C, which is about 125° F outside and I'm sitting in a plant. I'm sweating like a hoodenanny and and there are operators they're sweating worse than me. They're trying to maintain a membrane which is the heart of the desalination plants. This is the advanced tool for that desalinates water.

And I was I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, okay, well, um this membrane is a consumable. It's a dumb plastic essentially. You give it good water, it does well. If you give it bad water for whatever reason, it does doesn't do well. It's you know, it's it's an unintelligent medium. And the thought

initiated in my head that what if we could talk to this membranes? What if this membrane could talk back to us in real time? And what and and that would enable us to identify a problem. So, I'm not sitting here sweating and these poor operators are not running less um trying to make this thing work and

trying to help these communities get some fresh water. That was 22 years ago. Fast forward 2015 is where I came across this technology that we're developing in the Active Membrane. It was through the originally mentor, Professor David Jassby. He was at the time at UC Riverside and then now he's at UCLA. One

of my co-founders. And he was talking about um membranes that are electrically conducting. Now, why is that significant? Because like any other device, like this guy or anybody that that is on a smart device, what what makes what makes it a smart? The ability to communicate with it through electrons, through electricity. One form

of another. You send electron, you send back those becomes the signals and that becomes the the medium of communication between you and that a smart device. And then you there is a language, you either create that language or you either learn that language. So, when a membrane is electrically conducting it has the ability to receive electrons

and send electrons back to you. So, now you can communicate with it. What is the language? You learn it. How would you learn it? Because the language is science. The language is in there, we just don't know about it.

You know, those guys that were digging up hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt or whatever, when they came out, they looked at this hieroglyphs. It was a language, they just didn't know what it meant. So, they they they had decoded it, right? It's the same thing here. So, I I realized that this has a potential

to change an industry. And um fast forward another few years, back in 2022, we had some money from an another venture. And we wanted to invest it in something that is good and and then you know, aligned with what we're trying to do.

And this technology at the time came out of for licensing from UCLA tech office. So, we took a license on it. And we started taking it out of David's lab and trying to commercialize it and you know, 3 years on um it's it's been a really interesting journey. Now, um why is this important?

Because um in water desalination, imagine water is 97% of the world fresh water is all saline. When it was just quickly, when we're saying desalination, are we specifically saying salt to fresh water or just non-potable water to potable water?

Non-potable water, saline water to potable water, to fresh water. Okay, got it. Got it. Yeah. So, 97% of the world water resources are saline, non-potable. So, we have to make them potable and drinkable, right? The technology that we have is desalination.

Water desalination is limited because of these membranes. These membranes are dumb, they're unintelligent, they're plastics, consumables. So, you have to build an entire bells and whistles around them for them to be able to work. That makes the process complicated.

Expensive. So, while San Diegos and Dubais of the world can afford it. It is those lower disadvantaged communities that cannot afford it because one, they don't have the technical sophistication to be able to operate it, and two, more importantly, they just don't have the money to buy it.

So, it's remains a limited option with a lot of adoption barriers. Now, imagine one technology that can solve the global water scarcity crisis being not affordable to everybody. Cannot have that as human species. It's just not sustainable. What we're trying to do is we're trying to go and attack the problem at the

heart of it. Trying to make membranes a smart. Mhm. Make membranes a smart. If those membranes can decide how they operate and how they can maintain their performance level, then all them wells and bells and whistles around at the desalination plant that make you complicated and expensive try to go away or minimize.

Now, you have reduced the size of it. And now you have reduced the complexity of the complexity of it. What happens? I'll give you another example. Uh That 20 years ago, I Mhm. I was a overseas student. My mom used to call me once a week because it was expensive. Landlines were not that accessible. International calls

were super expensive. Now, these guys came, right? My mother now, God bless her, calls me 20 times a day. Yeah, yeah. Right? Everybody has one of these, right? Yeah, yeah. So, this is what we want to do with desalination. We want to democratize it.

Wow. We want to make it widespread, but this is not This is humanitarian. It's very good, but look at the business side of it because all of a sudden the market that is $3 billion a year becomes $300 billion a year. And everybody would benefit from it.

So, we're That's what we're what we're all about. So, sorry. Go ahead. No, this is Thank you for the for for laying all of that because it bunch of questions. First, when we're talking about um access to this degree to this extent, are we saying are are we saying that the vision is that um ultimately we can have

a water bottle, for example, and you can fill it with uh you know, non-potable water, and then have some type of uh you know, technological innovation that would be able to filter that out and then give you drinking water at a at a personal residential scale, or are we talking about a like city-by-city type

of scale? You know, what's what's realistic? All of that any scale. All of it. An- anything that goes under your sink at your home that can fill up your bottle provided that your bottle is something recyclable. Don't please don't use the plastic bottles. That's right. Um But but all the way to cities and then

communities of any of any kind. Um Got it. So So, then So, then uh can we talk through how um the particular So, your So, your technology, you're creating these things that are that are dumb, that are you know, they don't have their own life, and you're creating Our membranes. Right, you're creating

the the ability for them to communicate. Um what are they communicating, and how does it actually help uh all of these reductions in cost and complexity? So, when you're filtering things out of a filter, uh filters um traditionally or uh they have a pore size, right? Anything in the water that is above that pore

size gets separated. Anything's below it passes through. Membranes, reverse osmosis desalination membranes, they are the tightest water filters uh that there is. They separate molecules of salt, right? Very small very small pore sizes. That's good, but the bad thing is that anything bigger than that, and there are many contaminants in water um that come

on it, they can easily clog that membrane. And that when that membrane is clogged, it loses its performance quite quickly, and it requires a lot of maintenance, a lot of laundry, a lot of cleaning to be able to uh to be able to operate at the level, and it gradually loses its life

and eventually becomes void. Now, the membranes that we're making, they're electrically conducting, which means that we can manipulate their surfaces, so they can respond to an event of clogging and prevent it. So, they're not prematurely clogged. They wouldn't lose their performance as quickly as the other guys.

And they do not need a significant amount of pretreatment of water to be able to operate at a sustainable level. That's why That's how we're making it the smart. Now, what it communicates to us is that look, um you have to give me this signal for me to be able to improve my performance. If you don't give me

that signal, I'm going to be losing my performance with with respect to the water quality that I'm seeing, this is or is not the right signal. Wow. You can change that. More excitingly, in the future, as you collect this data with the advent of AI and adaptive learning and whatever, you can help this membrane to learn over

time. It's morning. This is the water quality I'm going to get. I'm going to change myself to this. It's evening. This is the water quality I'm going to get. I'm going to change my behavior to that. Got it. And so on and so forth.

That is our vision to change something that is an aesthetic hardware consumable into a platform that can you know, behave in real time, very much like human beings, to an event that may or may not impact its performance or longevity or well-being. Okay. Yeah, some something uh from the perspective of someone who has not had to physically

maintain I've never had to sit next to a desalination machine and sweat, you know, and and to think about whether it's working or not. So, when I think about membrane fouling and these contaminants, I think about literally these it's almost like a uh like a like a coffee filter, you know, with with with with coffee

grounds, and so you have to physically take it out and take it back in. So, it's surprising to me to hear Are you saying that you can send a particular type of electrical charge into the membrane, and it can repel the contaminants? So, we send three signals.

One is the waveform, the other one is the voltage, and the third one is the frequency of application of that waveform. And and that's the language that I was talking about. So, for every water quality or every contaminant, a combination of those three uh can be applied on the surface of these membranes to fine-tune its

response to that event contamination event. Right? And um you know, the coffee example is is the coffee filter example is an a great example. Filters are like that. They're consumables. They clog, and you have to throw them out.

Now, that This is on molecular level. That's on a you know, household appliance. Right. Concept is the same. Um for them not to be um something that is a consumable, um then uh you know, you you have to make them a smart. You have to make them in charge of their fate, hence the name active

membranes. Right. They're active. So, they're So, they're able to clean themselves is what you're saying. Or or main or delay the the process of getting dirty. Got it. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. So, um So, then from when you When would you say you launched active membranes specifically? About what year?

2022. So, how has um in the course of growing the business, how has the technology evolved? Uh fully scaled up right now. Um from Has it changed fundamentally, or is it kind of the same? Fundamentally, um it has changed. Well, when you're taking something out of a lab and you're scaling up, there are

always new things because there are a lot of unknown unknowns, right? So, you have to learn those unknown unknowns. And we have learned a lot of unknown unknowns. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Concept has remained the same. Uh the methods that we have developed in the scaling up the technology in fabricating a smart membranes, in making them, and make

functioning them, their response all of that, there are a lot of stuff that we had to learn. How did we do that? We just um you know, started making these things and putting them in field tests, and uh you know, sometimes they broke.

Uh Always when something breaks, you learn more about it than when it works. So, they broke, we learned the lesson, we made a better product, and so on and so forth. Um what we have done over these 3 years uh has been significant that there's a couple of reasons for that.

We uh First of all, we have a fantastic team. Bright young people here that are working on this technology. Shout out to the team. Shout out to the team helping me and helping everybody else. Without their work, we wouldn't be possible. But then uh we had a lot of good shots. We got a lot of good grants

um to be able to go into the field um and then test these membranes and and then validate them and so on. Uh we've got good investors that uh have invested in us and helped us um you know, um do this. Um We had a lot of good traction, a lot of awards, a lot of uh

commercial partnerships that have been developed over the past 3 years. Uh for a startup to succeed, whether you're making membranes or you're making anything, uh you need a ecosystem of what I've mentioned to work. You need the universe to uh to collaborate with you creating that ecosystem for for the startup to succeed. So far we had a good run and

I'm really grateful for it. Um Right now what we're doing is that we have to go through another level of um um expansion because we have a lot of demand, so we have to expand our size to be able to uh meet that demand.

to have. Good problem to have, but it's still a problem to solve. So we have to raise some money to be able to to be able to make that expansion. That's good. Have you always Have you always envisioned yourself as a founder of as an entrepreneur? Or is this the uh the first time you bought a company?

Well, no, it's not the first time. I I've I've tried it once um and I failed miserably. Uh this is Learned a lot. It hurt us hell that the when it happened, but now in retrospect when you look back there is a lot of lessons to learn. And then fast forward a few years later

I was working at in a startup um and the people that were managing that startup, kindest people. Um one of them is my co-founder, the other one is now my CTO. God bless them. They said, "Look, there is this um executive training program at UCLA School of Management in Anderson.

And uh I think we think you need to go on um you know, you It was like a six-month like packed MBA type of a deal. And then you have to go on and then you'll find it useful." And I said, "Have I made too many mistakes and you think it's cheaper to to educate

me?" I said, "Okay, you know what? I just just go and figure it out. Honestly, and I went through that and it was six months. It was one of the best experiences. It was life-changing. And and then and as I was going through that and I realized where I failed before and then why did I do wrong and

all the lessons came out. When I came out of that um program I I I honestly wanted to um become an entrepreneur and in this sector in the water sector and again your will is not the only factor here.

You need to meet a universe of people that would enable that and help you get there. And I was very very fortunate to have that universe. A lot of good people helped me along the way. A lot of opportunities came up and I seized them and um we are where we are today.

Well, let's let's let's let's dive a little bit into that because one of the things that I love to pull out on this uh on this podcast are cuz it's some of the most impactful content I've consumed personally is when someone says, "You know, I've navigated this and and and these are the parts that I've failed and

here I am succeeding in it." So if you have somebody that is looking, whether it's the water industry or not, and if it is the water industry, you know, we encourage whoever's listening to go and build it. But if you're giving advice to a young entrepreneur and they say, "Hey, I either have the opportunity to um to

try and commercialize this new technology or you know, maybe it's not patented technology, it's some other solution. Uh but it's but it's uh you know, in a in a deep tech um environment, what advice would you give to somebody? So I would something happened. There are there are some um high-level of stuff and I'll get to

the the path as well. The high-level of stuff is that um what I've learned throughout my life is that continuity and perseverance is are are key. Um In the life of an entrepreneur, even the course of a day or a week, there are so many ups and downs.

You know, sometimes things work, most of the time they won't. There are a lot of people who say no to you. There are two people that say yes and and then it it's not for the faint-hearted. You have to persevere. You have to have a strong mental health um to be able to do that.

And then and I would say to everybody, if you really want to do this, persevere. Second thing I would tell them is be financially and fiscally uh responsible and plan things because your capital is your biggest asset. Your cash is your biggest asset in this business.

Make sure you spend it wisely and make sure you invest it wisely. But the thing thing is that when I started when we started active membrane, there are many uh things that uh you can benefit from. There are government grants, there are funds that are available out there. There are early stage investors, angel investors

that are out there that you can go to and raise money and and take this uh to the next level. Raise as much as money as you need, nothing more, nothing less. Uh be very capital efficient. And then dig into this. We live in the world and we live in a country that all

of those resources are widely available even at a state or federal level. That's very fortunate. Not many parts of the world have that. And and uh that's what I did. I went after um whatever I could find. Uh I had about eight shots at the beginning of this with grants and other things.

I was lucky that two if two of them landed, in my case seven of them did. Wow. And that helped us propel really. I mean and then and those are resources are available to everybody. You just, you know, pick and choose your battles and um just constantly run things. Technology is all about one aspect is money, the other

aspect of it is exposure. Try to use high-impact marketing events such as competitions um awards these kind of things that are relevant to that industry in order to be able to put your name out there. Market and brand the hell out of yourself and and then your technology.

And um if all of that comes together, um with a dash of luck then uh you know, um it it it takes off the ground. Uh one of the things that I had was was a great angel investor for the sake of argument.

Whose support was not just a check. Um It was mentoring. It was helping me understand and navigate things. Um steady myself when I needed so again, all of these resources are needed. And uh one who wants to go into this phase need to be able to um you know, harvest all of them, right?

Well, you said something interesting. You said uh when you're raising uh you know, raise as much as you need, nothing more, nothing less. How do you know how much you need? Um what I do is I take it in the steps.

Um here's what I'm going to do. A to B, how much money do I need? And then B to C, how much money do I need? And so on. It's sometimes very easy to raise a lot of money. Um nowadays it isn't, but if you raise a lot of money, then you're the the

and if you fail, that failure is going to be uh reputationally damaging. It's not it's irresponsible towards capital that you raised and the people that you raised that capital from. And so on and so forth. Um another component of it is that when people get money, they start spending like hell.

Uh fiscal discipline is very important. Figure out how much you what you are spending that money on. Uh it's easy to get on first class flights and go to this fancy, you know, expedite everything, go to this fancy events or whatever. But before making those decisions, um see where uh that money takes you. If

it's to spend somewhere else, what I'll give you an example. I We when we started this thing, we wanted to um take the technology out of the lab and try to scale it. So we went to Home Depot and bought like a 200 uh dollar drum and you know, a a hand painter sprayer and we started

no way. And and it cost us two, 300 dollars, but it gave us so many lessons and I have pictures of it. And then we figured out, "Okay, well, you know, we have to improve this and we have to improve that." And then the next one was about a 10,000 dollar machine.

And we learned our lessons on that 10,000 dollar machine. The next one was 35,000 dollars and so on and so forth. Now we're building something that is about 45,000 dollars. It's a machine that we call the Spitfire. And that machine is highly automated. It it's but it started with that drum. I could have gone and spent 50,000 dollars

in the beginning, buy this fancy machine, but that money would have been lost. That's awesome. Fiscal discipline and then how you allocate capital and your cash is Yeah. it you know, that's the most important thing. Great. What a great story. That is cool. Um what How long was that process between I mean now you said, you know, you're

you're you're operating this, but what was the process between Home Depot and the first commercial deployment? One year. One year. What what happened in that year though? Why did you deploy Well, you still was that the the period of time that you won the grants? A lot of painful things. Um so it it did we did So the first thing

that we did was that we took this uh we started coating these membranes and I spare you the detail because it's some of the embarrassing what sort of primitive methods that we used. Um we started making these and then we sent them to a competition, right?

Um they worked-ish and we managed to get uh become runner-up because we made a lot of things in that in that competition. That gave us some money. That money was then reinvested in uh trying to figure out the next method for us to be able to make these membranes better.

So the next version we made was this drum. And then after this drum um we tested those membranes again in the field and we realized, "Well, we can change this and we can change that." And so on and so forth. And it was a about the process of one to two years before

we actually were in a place that we thought that we could be really scaled up the process and and you know, we made it as good as as we could. But it was done in a very capital efficient manner. And um very careful um and and and uh you know, there is no one

recipe and prescription for any industry. In this case, we managed to figure it out. But always thinking about things is far more difficult than doing them. When you do them, you learn, you fail, you learn again, you stand up. That's why I'm saying continuity and perseverance is very important as well. And um

So what So what are what are the other just last question about the technology pieces? What are other Are there other approaches to accomplish what you're what you're doing? There's nothing like this out there. Cool. So the first of this kind that it has been scaled up to this level. Got it. And um

you know, are they going to figure it out? Maybe, but at some point, but but this this in this industry there's nothing like that. We are pioneers of making the smart membranes. Awesome. So So then So then with that where are we going? We mentioned Well, you mentioned at the beginning, you know, the vision, which

is to have desalination available at the cost and the simplicity of a single individual to take advantage of it. Um where How do Just give me a little bit more detail about how you see that happening? So passive membranes, you know, consumable membranes have dominated the past 50 years of desalination. What we like to

do with this technology is to dominate the next 50. For us to be able to do that, we have to increase our installation base. We have to make sure that these are out there operating. We have created a lot of a very healthy commercial pipeline of high flyers, people that operate big desalination

plants and a smaller desalination plants, and we're working with them to field pilot the technology at their installations and eventually convince them if they see the key performance indicators that we promised them to see to adapt the technology. And as as long as we adopt it, then we want to make sure that every desalination plant

existing or future desalination plant in one way or another has this platform in it. Got it. And And so And so that's that's a scale of I mean, is this Are we talking like one year, two years far as like deployment and We have a three-year scale-up plan in terms of increasing our

production capacity. This is based on the pipeline that we have developed. Our technology is production technology is modular. So it's very helpful for us to be able to deploy this technology as our demand grows. We have a um again, the three-year plan, and each year that we have to increase this this capacity and so on and so forth. And um

if that if that demand outgrows, you know, that that that plan, then we have to expand further, and we have to raise more money and expand further, but that's what our plan is so far. Got it. Well, two two two questions that I love to to ask everybody, and you had mentioned a problem earlier, and it was

a good problem still a problem to solve, but I'm curious for you growing the company right now, what is the biggest hurdle, and how is it also an opportunity? So um as a founder, um you tend to do a lot of things at the at the very early stages of any startup. You

you you know, clean the windows, you manage the finances, you do the operations, you do whatever you can. You clean the windows cuz the membranes are cleaning themselves. So Um as a founder, eventually it comes to a point at the life of any startup where the founder, the CEO founder, becomes the most big the biggest impediment

because so you have to as a CEO have to learn to delegate, you have to learn to enable people, um and and and do that. I'm still figuring that out. Um that's one of the things that I'm personally figuring out. Um funding and finding the right investors who understand what you're doing, whose

visions are aligned, whose values are aligned with with the organization that one is trying to build is also very challenging. And it's uh the the you approach too many people, let's say you make 500 pitches with an opportunity of one or two of them land.

Right? So it's very demoralizing when you see a lot of no's. Um maintaining composure and and zooming out and maintaining the big picture and maintaining focus is very important. It's a challenge. Not easy. Sometimes I have you know, even even at this age stage you have days that are pretty good, days that are pretty bad. Making sure that

the you have a overall mental composure is very important. And those are the things that have been most challenging for me. And I'm I'm still trying figuring it out. I'm not. But uh but you'll get there. You'll learn as a human being.

Yes, you will. Absolutely. Well, I appreciate you bringing those parts up because I feel like there's there's a lot of opportunity to speak about technology this, technically data of customers, but when it comes to building a company, and you mentioned a few times it it's it's it's a lot about what happens up here.

And and so I appreciate you highlighting that cuz anytime I you know, anytime that gets mentioned, it's important. So with all this work to be done, Aryan, I'm curious what inspires you? Um it all goes back to that village that I used to go to.

Because those are the people who need it. And our job as technologists are eventually I love to make money, don't get me wrong. I'm a capitalist, but but there are a lot easier way to make money. And as a technologist, what we have to do, whatever we have to do, the legacy that we leave behind, it has to be a

legacy of helping our fellow species and human beings. And you know, that that image of that those individuals in that remote village in southern Iran where they see the water tank here on a weekly basis and their eyes light up, um that's that's what it's all about uh when you're in water industry. And

I'm and I'm hoping that I that this technology and my team, myself and everybody else that is working on it, leave a legacy that um is is is put the smiles on those people's faces. Well, uh yeah, I mean, easy to be inspired by you know, by stories like that. So if anyone

else was inspired to follow along or get in contact, what's the best way to do so? Uh email, LinkedIn, um just reach out to me. I'm an easy person to reach. Great. Well, Aryan, thank you. Thank you for your transparency. Thank you for being easy person to reach, easy person to talk to. Thank you for having

me. I appreciate Every time everybody wants to hear your story is a great opportunity. Thank you for that.