About The Company
The United States sits on enormous reserves of lithium-rich brine—but until now, most of it has been too dilute, too contaminated, or too costly to tap into. Lithios is changing that. Founded by MIT scientists Mo Alkhadra, PhD, and Professor Martin Bazant, PhD, the Medford, Massachusetts-based company has built an electrochemical extraction system that pulls lithium directly from low-grade brines without chemicals or heavy water use and at up to 40% lower cost than competing technologies. In a market racing to secure domestic supply of the metal that powers everything from electric vehicles to grid-scale storage to defense systems, Lithios is a potential game-changer.
The company’s Advanced Lithium Extraction (ALE) technology works on a deceptively simple principle: lithium-selective battery electrodes capture lithium ions from brine when electricity is applied. The result is a streamlined process that eliminates 45% of the processing steps and produces 95% less solid waste compared to competing brine extraction methods. Critically, ALE requires minimal customization across radically different brine chemistries, enabling it to work with a wide variety of brines, spanning the oilfield and geothermal brines found in the American heartland and Europe, continental salars in South America, and produced water from oil and gas operations prevalent in the Middle East and United States. Lithios has already tested its system with more than 20 brine types across four continents.
Lithios has moved fast. The company launched its pilot and manufacturing facility in Medford in late 2024, secured $12 million in funding, logged thousands of hours of operating uptime, and began field operations with a US lithium developer in Arkansas by the end of 2025. CEO Mo Alkhadra was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Energy and Green Tech, and co-founder Martin Bazant was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Lithios was also selected for the Arkansas Lithium Technology Accelerator and nominated for the New England Venture Capital Association’s Emerging Company of the Year in Advanced Systems.
In April 2026, Lithios hit its biggest milestone yet: selection for the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E SCALEUP-Ready program. With this selection, Lithios is set to begin award negotiations for up to $20 million in federal funding. The money will enable Lithios to build its first-of-its-kind commercial pilot plant in Arkansas. Lithios was one of just two companies chosen for the program, which carries a total allocation of $40 million. The commercial pilot, targeted for 2027, will produce lithium at an industry-relevant scale of 100 tonnes per annum of lithium carbonate equivalent (tpa-LCE)—a critical proving ground on the path to full commercial production. At a moment when US policymakers are urgently focused on reducing dependence on foreign lithium sources, Lithios is positioned squarely at the center of the national effort to build a resilient domestic supply chain.
Wolf Greenfield & Lithios
Wolf Greenfield has worked with Lithios since its earliest days, when Shareholder Tani Chen first connected with co-founder Mo Alkhadra through MIT’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. From the outset, the team moved aggressively to build a robust patent portfolio—filing multiple families and dozens of claims at the provisional stage to establish broad protection for Lithios’ core electrochemical extraction technology. Today, the portfolio spans approximately 10 patent families with coverage in the United States and internationally, reflecting the company’s rapid expansion from a bench-scale research effort to a commercially focused enterprise with significant backing. As Lithios has evolved—sharpening its positioning around US strategic interests and domestic lithium supply—Wolf Greenfield has helped ensure that the company’s IP strategy keeps pace with its business trajectory.
