Industrial separation challenges are increasingly defined by complex, variable chemistries rather than simple single-solute feeds. Battery recycling leachates, mining/geothermal brines, and chemical process waters contain valuable ions alongside high background salinity, acids/bases, and competing species. In these environments, conventional separation technologies often struggles to deliver the ion selectivity needed for efficient recovery and wastewater reduction.

naion.tech is an industrial startup developing tailor-made nanofiltration (NF) membranes by combining Layer-by-Layer (LbL) polyelectrolyte coatings with AI-guided design on a hollow-fiber support (Figure 1). LbL deposition provides a modular way to tune the effective pore size and charge density of the selective layer through controllable parameters such as polyelectrolyte chemistry, number of layers, ionic strength, pH, crosslinking, and post-treatment. This creates a practical “design space” of coating recipes that can be adapted to specific feed chemistries and separation targets.

Our development workflow couples rapid experimental screening with data-driven optimization to map feed chemistry and target selectivity/permeance with coating recipe, accelerating iteration compared to purely empirical approaches. The goal is not a single “best” membrane, but a repeatable method to configure membranes for a defined separation task, for example, suppressing specific impurities, improving mono-/multivalent discrimination, or maintaining selectivity under elevated ionic strength. Implementing the selective layer on hollow fibers enables an industry-standard form factor with high packing density and a clear path to scalable module manufacturing.

At Filtech, we present the naion.tech workflow and how it translates application requirements into membrane properties and scalable hollow-fiber modules, enabling higher recovery yields and lower chemical and wastewater footprints in resource recovery and process-water reuse.