Mo Alkhadra spent years of his life figuring out how to remove troublesome materials - from toxic lead to radioactive waste - out of water. But as he progressed along his doctorate studies at MIT, he realized if he wanted to bring his technology to market, he'd need to do something other than build a better Brita.

We ended up talking to large corporates who had an interest in that domain," Alkhadra said TechCrunch. But, he added, "I had been warned to a certain extent by investors and other stakeholders in the industry about how tough it would be from a business standpoint.".

So instead, Alkhadra shifted his focus. Instead of trying to deliver clean water and ridding it of unwanted impurities, he'd extract valuable minerals trapped in water deep in the earth's reservoirs. Alkhadra's startup, Lithios, will start with lithium, a mineral that's in high demand as the automotive industry transitions to electric cars.

Today, most lithium is either mined or captured by evaporating briny water on vast salt flats, most of which lie in Andean South America. But extracting lithium this way is expensive, slow, and geographically limited.

A new crop of startups is rising to meet the booming demand for lithium, especially for lithium that can be derived from sustainable sources. Beyond Lithios, Lilac Solutions and EnergyX are all battling to be the lithium source automakers and battery manufacturers want. They extract lithium from briny water hauled from below the earth's surface, but they each tackle the challenge of getting metal out of water in a little different way.

Lithios' approach is very much similar to the mechanism wherein a lithium-ion battery operates. One has lithium ions closepacked inside the anodes, much like books on a shelf. As the battery charges or discharges, those ions flow back and forth between the two terminals, nestling themselves in the nooks of the anode or cathode, which is made from materials known as intercalation compounds.

In Lithios' design, briny, lithium-rich water passes past electrified intercalation compounds. Which ones? Alkhadra wouldn't say. "We use inexpensive, abundant materials that are known to work for lithium," he said. "I don't want to tell the specific chemistry yet, but these are battery compounds which are actually used in lithium-ion batteries today. They are scalable, easily manufacturable, have robust supply chains."

In Lithios' device, those compounds act as a sponge, letting in lithium but ignoring all the other stuff dissolved in water. That sponge becomes saturated, and Lithios drains the briny water, turns on a fresh water tap, and reverses the process. Lithium flows out from the sponge into fresh water.

The lithium that is released into a clean water solution is a very concentrated, purified solution that is readily converted into battery powders," Alkhadra said.

The entire process was designed to minimize water use. The remaining briny water is injected back into the ground, and much of the water in the "release" step can be reused, he added. "I grew up in Saudi Arabia, a very arid, dry region."

Lithios recently raised $10 million in seed funding. The company exclusively disclosed its financing to TechCrunch. Clean Energy Ventures led the round and was joined by GS Futures, Lowercarbon Capital, MassCEC, and TechEnergy Ventures. The company also raised $2 million in venture debt through Silicon Valley Bank for the purchase of manufacturing equipment and processing equipment.

The infusion will help the company scale its system from a small bench-top lab experiment to a suitcase-sized pilot that it can take out to the field to test brines in the wild. Alkhadra said Lithios had tested 16 different brines from North America, South America, and Europe.

"We're probably one scale-up stage behind the ultimate vision of having a refrigerator-sized system, ", he said. "The system from there on would be replicated in a modular fashion to go for large commercial projects making thousands of tons of lithium carbonate. Not suggesting that that's going to happen in a year or two, but we're working toward that in the next couple of years".